


Till the Stars Go Dark

by speaks



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Fluff, M/M, Romance, Science Fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Siri how do I comprehend infinity?, Siri what is the answer to life the universe and everything?, are soulmates real?, klance, siri is entropy reversible?, what is life?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-14
Updated: 2020-01-14
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:34:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,673
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22175632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/speaks/pseuds/speaks
Summary: “There is no such thing as ‘natural’ in this universe,” Allura tells him, blinking once, slowly. “We are the gods of our own realities.”A surge of confidence and recklessness takes control of him, propelling him forward. This still feels insane, but since when has that ever held him back? “Yeah, alright,” he agrees. “Do it.”“Spoken like a true paladin,” she giggles. “You are not afraid?”“No. Should I be?”“No,” she laughs again, “no. You will only be asleep for an hour or so. It will feel as if you've simply taken a nap.”“Cool,” Keith says. “See you later, then.” And as he closes his eyes, he hears a switch flip.
Relationships: Keith/Lance (Voltron)
Comments: 219
Kudos: 1086





	Till the Stars Go Dark

**Author's Note:**

> Special thanks to my boi Froggy for being my biggest cheerleader, wise beta, and beloved friend. <3
> 
> This is not quite like my other klance fics (the closest thing is probably Speak for the Stars), but this is the type of story I love to tell the most, as a writer. I'm excited to share it with you, and I really hope it resonates.
> 
> I feel like I say this before every fic but I swear the fluff is worth the angst. Please note my decision not to use archive warnings. You'll just have to trust me going into this that I'm bringing you safely to the end.
> 
> Cheers

* * *

. . .

_cloudless every day you fall_

_upon my waking eyes_

_inviting and inciting me to rise_

_. . ._

_and through the window in the wall_

_come streaming in on sunlight wings_

_a million bright ambassadors of morning_

_. . ._

_and no one sings me lullabies_

_and no one makes me close my eyes_

_so I throw the windows wide_

_and call to you across the sky_

_. . ._

Roger Waters // from “Echoes” // 1970

* * *

It’s not like Keith had every single star in the Sonoran night sky memorized.

After all, the sky was ever turning, the Earth always wobbling on its axis. Even though his heart was always set on flying among the stars himself someday, when he turned his face toward them in the dead of night, he tended to forget the details—like which star was which, or what the constellations were called, or what time of year he could expect to see them sliding overhead between dusk and dawn.

But now that he’s sitting cross-legged in front of a port window that overlooks an entirely different set of stars than the ones he was born under, he knows that even if he couldn’t name them all, he did have the view of the universe from Earth memorized. His body did, at least. If not his brain, then his body.

These feet walked on alien soil this month. The oxygen in his lungs right now? Filtered in an alien ventilation system. The atoms in the food he ate for breakfast this morning have probably never been within ten thousand light-years of Earth. The team has been gone from Arus for a few weeks now, and the unfathomable distance that the wormhole took them from their home planet feels so much more real now that they’re away from Arus, adrift in space.

This isn't just space, either. It's _deep_ space. There are no star systems around here, not for light years and light years. No floating matter in any direction. It’s all _void_ outside this window. There’s nothing there.

According to the map Coran showed them, they’re in a different arm of the galaxy now than the one Earth resides in; far closer to the sparse outer regions of the galaxy than the interior of Orion’s Arm where Earth sits. Upon squinting at the map, Pidge announced to the room that they were so far from home that if someone flashed a flashlight at them right now from Earth, it’d take roughly sixty-thousand years for the light to reach them.

So yeah. There’s that.

And it’s… it’s a lot.

Keith prides himself on having learned to keep his head when life throws him curveballs, but it’s a lot. It’s finally hitting them all, how far out of their depth they’ve traveled in so short a time, and they’re all dealing with it their own ways. Shiro with that same old silent strength he wears like armor. Hunk with unconcealed panic and worry about the future to anyone who listens. Pidge by geeking out over discovery, detached from the emotion. And Lance by filling every waking silence with sound, whether it's complaining about the food or laughing at the training sequences or starting fights with Keith...

 _Everyone copes in their own way,_ Shiro scolded Keith after he snapped at Lance to _please try and take this seriously for five goddamn seconds._

If this is Lance coping, then fuck, Lance has been 'coping’ since the moment Keith met him.

As for Keith, he’ll cope with being thrust seventy-eight thousand light-years from home by just picking the nearest window for an hour every night and recalibrating. Tonight he's padded through the halls, barefoot and in his pajamas, and found an empty room south of the common area. It looks like the Alteans once used the room for storage, but now it houses nothing but empty boxes. The rounded windowsill is wide enough for him to sit in it sideways, provided he tucks his knees to his chest, so that's what he's doing. Staring out at the stars until he feels less like a dandelion seed blown across an ocean. It helps if he thinks of these unfamiliar stars less like stars, and more like the potential worlds they all are. Now that he knows aliens are real, now that it's more than a vague but intangible scientific belief, he can’t help but wonder how many billions and billions of beings inhabit the planets orbiting those distant specks of light. The infinity of it all is deafening, and the windowsill is ice cold on the soles of his feet.

“Keith?”

Lance’s voice is loud in the silence, and the emptiness of the small room Keith has holed himself up in dresses his warm voice with a cold metallic ring as it bounces off the crevice Keith is tucked in. Annoyed and tired and already _done_ with whatever Lance is going to say, Keith side-eyes him. Lance is hovering in the open doorway in his pajamas, leaning against the frame with his arms crossed, jaw set. He looks even more annoyed at his being here than Keith is, which isn't surprising seeing as he’s been even more impossible than he used to be, ever since the ambush on Arus.

Ever since he almost died.

Ever since he looked into Keith’s eyes with the softest and warmest expression anyone has ever laid on him, hand tightening with reassurance around Keith’s, and gave him a smile that made Keith’s heart flip over the page and start writing something new. Ever since his eyes rolled back and he collapsed onto Keith. Ever since Keith had to pick him up, arms and legs still shaking from battle exhaustion, and carry him all the way to the medbay, his head lolling against Keith's bicep, limbs swinging, mouth ajar, almost like he—like he was…

 _That was close,_ Coran told him after he’d sealed Lance up in the cryoregenic healing pod, and Keith slumped against the wall on the far side of the room as the pod glass fogged over, obscuring Lance’s face. _He might not have lived if you hadn’t come so quickly. Good work, Keith._

Even after Coran left to go check on the others again, Keith remained right where he was, his eyes glued to Lance’s shoulders as they rose and fell in slow, consistent rhythm. To this day he's not sure how long he stood there watching Lance breathe before Shiro came and found him there.

There was a cold chill roaming in Keith's soul that night, even though they'd won the battle. Because he'd brushed with death before, but he had never _seen_ it. Not like that. Not firsthand. Seeing the light drain out of Lance's eyes before he pitched forward and collapsed into Keith’s arms was the most sobering thing Keith had ever experienced, and in that moment he transcended everything he'd been to Keith thus far. _(Lance McClain. Boy from Cuba. Stranger and teammate, rival and friend, paladin, pilot, head full of helium, chip on his shoulder the size of goddamn Jupiter.)_ None of it mattered anymore. None of that meant anything. Not really. When Keith caught Lance’s weight in his arms to keep him from hitting the ground, Lance was just a boy, and nothing more.

That moment changed _everything_ for Keith.

The way he felt as a person.

The way he felt as a paladin.

And yeah.

Yeah.

The way he felt about Lance.

Unfortunately. Because, apparently, it didn't mean anything to Lance at all. Not even the part he was awake for. And now Keith doesn't know what to do with this budding sun inside of him that Lance woke up, other than to desperately kick sand on it before it catches fire.

“What do you want?” Keith grumbles, turning back to the stars. For some reason, he suddenly wishes that he wasn’t barefoot, that he wasn’t in his pajamas. He feels vulnerable. Doesn’t like it. Maybe he shouldn’t go walking around barefoot here; this isn’t his house.

“Allura says it's your turn next.”

Keith rolls his eyes and makes no move to get up. “Send someone else.”

“Everyone else has done it already. It's just you that's left.”

“Don't I get a say in this?” Keith snaps.

Lance only huffs with amusement. “I'd like to see you try and tell Allura no.”

At the mention of Allura and her demands, Keith scoffs. “No wonder you went first, with Allura asking.”

“I’ll _have you know_ that me going first was a noble sacrifice just in case their freaky alien brain machine gave someone an accidental lobotomy or something!”

“Heh, okay,” Keith ribs, making it crystal clear that he still thinks Lance was just tripping over a chance to hang out with Allura. Even though he isn’t actually sure what he believes anymore, after Arus. (Maybe Lance _was_ being noble. Wouldn’t that be interesting?)

“Ugh, you know what? Whatever. Tick tock, dude. Get off your ass and be a team player. Allura’s waiting.”

“It's just weird, alright?” Keith grits out, finally twisting around to look at Lance again, who's still crossing his arms in the same spot in the doorway. It’s annoying how handsome he looks, considering his hair is all mussed up and he’s just wearing loose pajama pants and a blue, Altean-style sleep-shirt. “I feel weird about it.”

For a long moment Lance sizes him up and Keith is certain he's about to be mocked mercilessly. He already regrets blurting that out. But then Lance exhales and uncrosses his arms. “Honestly?” he says, and he says it levelly enough that Keith finds himself listening more closely against his will. Lance is almost never willing to level with Keith. “I did too. But... it sounds important,” he decides, chewing each word carefully. “She wouldn't ask us to do this unless there was a good reason, you know? Like, we're in a _war_ dude, and the chances of one of us dying out here are actually pretty decent, so…” He trails off here, idly rubbing at the back of his neck while his eyes glaze over in no particular direction. It's brief, and then he snaps back to attention, his carefree nature returning like it was never gone.

Keith saw it flicker, though, and _fuck_ if the flickering doesn't have him enchanted. He feels no different than a mindless desert moth, fluttering after a stray spark as it departs from the campfire, following it toward some starry sky that neither of them can ever reach.

“Precautionary measures,” Lance laughs. (Keith either has a great poker face or Lance is blind. This stupid little crush needs to be stamped out before it gets any bigger or any more obvious.) "Our lifescan would be able to keep our lion flying long enough to find a replacement pilot if anything happened to one of us, and that counts for something, right? Hopefully that won't ever be necessary, but just in case... You don't wanna be the only one who didn't get scanned, do you?”

“It's not like I'd be around to regret it, anyway.”

“Yeah, but _we_ would,” Lance insists, foolishly opening himself up for the killshot.

“Oh?” Keith teases. “So you'll miss me if I die, huh? You gonna turn on my AI scan just so you can hear the sound of my voice again?”

Lance screws up his face at Keith immaturely, floundering for words. “I didn't say that!”

Keith smirks. “Uh-huh.” The scale has tipped back in his favor again. Thank god. He almost tripped into a chasm back there.

“Just go get your damn head scanned already!” Lance snaps, patience officially expended and face reddening with anger. He's so easy to infuriate. “Warning, you might have to shave your stupid hair off first so Allura can even find your tiny brain!”

He screeches and trips into retreat as Keith launches out of the windowsill and runs at him with murder in his eyes.

“Stop fighting!” Shiro yells from the rec room as Lance and Keith both go sprinting by the open door there a minute later, one after the other. Keith thinks that Shiro must not have heard how hard Lance is laughing and how childishly happy he sounds right now.

Even with all that chasing, Keith didn't actually give any thought to what he'd do if and when he caught his prize. So when he does catch Lance he tackles him without thinking, and down they go, and Lance is yelling in outrage and already grappling with Keith even as his back hits the floor. He shoves at Keith's face and it taps into a primal, petty, childish rage in Keith's heart that only Lance knows how to reach. He curses when Lance's hand connects with his jaw, and bites Lance's hand when it won't stop. Lance yells, and flails, and then his freakishly long legs revolt against Keith's weight and suddenly Keith is the one with his back on the floor. It happens so fast that he forgets to breathe—or maybe that's because Lance's forearm is on his ribcage. Briefly at advantage, Lance leans over him, and it looks like he's gonna go in for a headlock or something, until—

"Woah," Lance breathes, and he freezes above Keith.

The shift in his tone from rabid to surprised is so sudden that it takes Keith with it. Instead of flipping Lance with a well-practiced move like he was gearing up to do, Keith freezes underneath him, unsure what’s happening. Lance’s face is mere inches above Keith’s, and that has Keith’s heart picking up pace in his chest in a way that sparring never could. It has his brain running away with itself into worlds of shapeless possibility where this moment resolves with something wholly unpredictable, like a surrender, or a truce, or a confession.

But then, Lance still isn’t moving, and as Keith furrows his eyebrows expectantly Lance’s eyes begin to gloss over, as if he’s gone somewhere else entirely. It’s like he’s seeing straight through Keith to some place far away.

Oh no.

Keith didn't actually _hurt_ him with that tackle, did he?

In an instant Keith pushes Lance off and sits up. It was just a game, after all. It wasn't supposed to go too far. But before Keith can even ask if he's alright, Lance is settling back lazily on his haunches, his head tilting off to the right in curiosity, like a dog looking through the window at a passing car. "I just had the most _vivid_ déjà vu.”

"Déjà vu?" Keith parrots stupidly, both relieved and caught off guard by this.

"Yeah," Lance says, and it's so casual—almost friendly—which is jarring considering they were wrestling on the floor like animals less than ten seconds ago. "You ever get that? Déjà vu?"

"Sure," Keith finds himself admitting, "all the time."

Lance's eyes sparkle a little. And then, the energy shifts. Keith feels the change happen, feels the accumulated charge between them dissipating, leaving them both safely grounded. "I guess we have _one_ thing in common," Lance decides, and he uses Keith's shoulder to pull himself to a standing position, shoving it playfully on his way up to knock Keith over before running away again, cackling maniacally as he goes. As he vanishes, Keith can't help but bite back a laugh of genuine amusement at his antics. Because yeah, maybe he's just delighted to have pissed Keith off, and maybe Keith shouldn’t think much of a single bubbly laugh. But everything starts somewhere. And some of the best things there are

(like stars)

emerge from violence, and from messes, and sometimes—

(like the first time)

—they emerge from nothing at all.

“Are you sure about this?” Keith asks as Allura sits him down in the sterile white chair, because he does trust her but he still feels compelled to ask. As he settles into the chair, she sets about the task of fitting his head with complicated gear he couldn't possibly comprehend, fiddling with knobs and wires without really acknowledging that he's spoken. Her tongue pokes out as she concentrates, and when she clicks a button out of sight, something sticks the back of his neck—three hair-thin pokes in quick succession. He tries not to think too hard about spinal cords, or the miles of delicate nerves under his skin, or the fact that a twenty-year-old alien is preparing him for casual brain surgery.

“What are you unsure about?” Allura finally asks, although she's still distracted.

“Well, I just...”

He trails off because he doesn't know what to say. It's just weird. The idea of there being a complete scan of his Self. His life and memories and thoughts and feelings and regrets and aspirations, all of that being scanned and stored and saved in a file to be merged into an AI program in the event of his death so that his likeness could be wakened for use, like a robot, or an echo, or a _ghost_ … It’s disconcerting, to say the least.

“It seems messy,” he finally settles on. “Everyone is supposed to die. So isn't _this_... I dunno. Unnatural?”

That's what his dad would've said. It's unnatural.

Allura scoffs lightly. But when Keith doesn't reflect her amusement back she pauses, and then sits back, looking at him as if for the very first time. “Unnatural,” she repeats, tasting the word. “Is there anything in this reality that _isn't_ unnatural? What about space and time? Fourteen billion years ago there was nothing at all, and it was nice and peaceful and quiet until a _little_ explosion threw a wrench into things. Now we’ve got quarks and atoms and gravity and light… very messy indeed,” she laughs.

Keith can't help laughing a little at that too.

“And what about life itself?” she adds. “What about an unassuming little pond of water on a warm rocky planet where a bunch of lipids begin to multiply one day without warning? Five billion years pass and suddenly the descendants of those lipids are walking and talking and having opinions. Is that unnatural?”

“Well, when you put it that way.”

Allura sweeps her cascading hair back over her shoulders before leaning over him to make one final adjustment to one last wire. Then she grins down at him. As humanoid as she looks, it's hard not to see the alien in her when she's this close; it's hard not to feel overwhelmed by the impossible depth to her irises and how they sparkle back at him. And as he looks into them now, he feels a strange anticipation kicking up in his gut, not unlike the moment on the tarmac when your engine starts to roar.

“There is no such thing as ‘natural’ in this universe,” Allura tells him, blinking once, slowly. “We are the gods of our own realities.”

A surge of confidence and recklessness takes control of him, propelling him forward. This still feels insane, but since when has that ever held him back? “Yeah, alright,” he agrees. “Do it.”

“Spoken like a true paladin,” she giggles. “You are not afraid?”

“No. Should I be?”

“No,” she laughs again, “no. You will only be asleep for an hour or so, and then you'll wake up and go about the rest of your evening and you'll feel no side effects at all. It will be as if you've simply taken a nap.”

“Cool,” Keith says. “See you later, then.” And as he closes his eyes, he hears a switch flip.

It happens fast. The darkness behind his eyelids encroaches beyond his eyes and into his veins and obscures the hum of the ventilation system pumping air above them, softens the press of the chair against his back, slows the tide of Allura's voice as she gifts to him a few more parting words that he doesn’t quite hear. The alien language doesn't translate into dreams, and the last few syllables come apart into fragments: shining runes, silver and strange. Pockets of meaning without any footholds flutter farther and farther from each other until all that's left is reverberant static, noiseless static that quiets as it goes, as everything fades, as it fades and blackens and the black itself fades, and empties, and opens, and,

Waking up is slow.

Much slower than usual.

It happens in increments. First, he regains consciousness, but only barely. Enough to be aware of existence; not enough for conscious thought. For what feels like an eternity, he’s a single-celled organism. Then: his nose twitches on its own as the sense of smell returns to him and floods him with the overwhelming scent of stale dust, pulling to the forefront of his mind an ancient memory, probably one of his very oldest. An aged, oval carpet in a desert living room, dust flecks sparkling in a stripe of early sunlight, and a toy airplane. The nostalgia burns a little. Drives him awake. With some concentration, he manages to move his fingers, and with that, he is alert enough to sense something else.

Gravity is wrong.

It's… _off_.

Absent.

It must be, because he’s not laying down. There’s nothing at his back, or his feet, or anywhere. He doesn’t feel _anything_. May as well be floating in the void of space, sans spacesuit. Butterflies swoop through him as he realizes this and his eyes snap open to search for answers. What the hell could have happened in the hour or so that he’d been asleep?

It’s dark, wherever he is.

Not ‘I’ve been jettisoned into space’ dark, but very dark nonetheless. The lights are off in the castle, at least in this room, save for the neon blue emergency lights lining the base and top of the walls. They’re running on backup power? Why?

Instinctively, reacting to the lack of gravity, he throws his arms out in search of an anchor point. (Because once you drift away from a wall in Zero-G, there’s absolutely no way of getting back until someone comes to rescue you.) But all he gets for his efforts is a moment of wobbling and stumbling. He’s too far from any walls to grab hold, but it’s okay, because despite his floundering, he doesn’t float away from the ground and lose his point of contact.

Confused by this development, he tests the situation by raising one foot, and slowly dropping it flat to the floor again. Weird. It’s as if the artificial gravity is technically on, but he just… can’t feel it? The sensation is deeply disconcerting. Frowning, he moves his right arm again, watching it, noting how the familiar weight of it is also glaringly absent. If he wasn’t looking directly at it, he wouldn’t even know it was moving. It’s like he’s dreaming.

Confusion mounting, he gropes blindly at his head, and finds nothing. No scanning gear; it’s been fully removed. Where is Allura? Why did she leave him to wake up in this room, of all places, instead of the room he went to sleep in? Why is he waking standing up? What’s wrong with the artificial gravity?

He turns in a small circle, attempting to puzzle out why he’s been brought here, of all places, to wake up from the scan. Under his feet is a small dias, a flat silver circle, and nothing happens when he steps off of it to gauge his surroundings. Again, the upside-down butterflies of antigravity whip through his entire body, and he fights the urge to fling his arms out to steady himself. He’s utterly weightless—and yet, he still doesn’t float away listlessly from his point of contact. Every cell in his body screams that it’s not right. It’s not possible. That’s not how anti-gravity _works_. It’s one or the other! What the hell is happening?!

Fighting the urge to panic over the fact that physics itself appears to have broken, he takes a deep breath, and reminds himself that a couple years ago he thought wormholes were pure sci-fi. Nothing’s _really_ impossible, right? Maybe it’s some new gravity failsafe Coran is testing, or something. Focus on the more pressing issues first.

He knows where he is now, at least. He seems to have found himself in one of the classy lounges on the east wing of the castle. They remind Keith of the study rooms you could sign up to use for an hour at the Garrison, each outfitted with a leather couch facing the outer window and a small coffee table adorned with a gold geometric centerpiece. Crisp and clean yet somehow friendly and comfortable, all at once. Although he stumbled across this area once during late night wandering and found it kinda charming, he’s never spent any time here because the lounges afford no privacy from each other. Each lounge is separated by a liminal space that not only connects it to the main castle corridor, but also to the next lounge. Each room leads into the next, through a sliding metal door and across a narrow hall, and every dividing wall in-between has a glass window set into it. Which means that if you stand in one lounge, you can see through to all of them, in either direction, through the glass. As someone who prefers to sit with his back to a wall at all times, Keith has always found the effect unnerving. It makes him feel vulnerable. Watched.

Walking slowly so as not to upset his fragile balance or make a sound, he moves to the interior window on the right, peering through the dark hallway into the next lounge, and the next one, and the next one, and the next one… All empty. There’s also a faint reflection of all the lounges extending behind him in the glass too, and the resulting optical illusion makes it seem like he’s looking into a hall of infinite mirrors. Without the press of gravity on his shoulders and under his feet, there’s nothing to convince his body that he’s not staring straight down a bottomless shaft either, instead of sideways into a window. Vertigo swoops up from his stomach again. So he looks to the window that leads outside instead. It’s the biggest window of all. It takes up the entire outer wall between here and the deadly void of space and provides more light to the lounge than any of the emergency lighting does. The reason for this becomes apparent as Keith approaches the glass, leaning in close and squinting at the unfamiliar array of stars. Their ship isn’t where it should be.

They’re orbiting a star. If the naked eye and the educated guess of a flight school dropout are to be trusted, then it’s a medium-sized, relatively young, main-sequence star. He has to squint as he studies it; it’s golden-white and blinding even from this far away, even through the specially tinted glass. If he’s correct on the size guess, then they’re orbiting at a distance similar to Venus from its own sun. But _why?_ They weren’t anywhere near a star when Keith went in to get scanned. Why are they here?

A small, reserved knock grabs his attention.

Relieved, he turns back toward the window leading off to the next lounge on his right, expecting to see Allura, or Shiro maybe. But that expectation evaporates into shock when he sees someone wholly unfamiliar with his knuckles raised to the glass.

Keith opens his mouth, the shout of _intruder_ catching on his tongue as he stares, leaving him open-mouthed and silent. It’s a human. This person is undoubtedly human, and unfamiliar, and old.

There’s an old man on the castleship.

Alright.

Adjusting to that.

Keith takes a step back into defensive mode as the man moves toward the door, and fumbles at his hips for a weapon when it hisses open. No bayard there. No knife either. Shit, where is his knife?

The door hisses closed behind the man, and then they’re shut in the room together, he and Keith. There’s a prolonged stretch of silence where the man just stands there and stares, stares and stares and stares, his eyes growing wetter as Keith grows tenser. And then finally, he takes a deep shuddering breath, and says, “Hey.”

There’s something in his voice. Something deeply familiar even though it’s _not_ , and it sends Keith over the edge.

“Who are you?” he snaps. “What’s going on? Where are we? Where’s everyone else and why am I—”

“Hey,” the man soothes, stepping closer even as Keith steps away, “take a deep breath, I’ll explain, okay? Deep breaths, Keith.”

 _Why do you know my name?_ he wants to shout. _Why are you here? Why hasn’t anyone else come to get me yet? Where are all my friends?_

“Keith,” the man says slowly, carefully, like Keith is a wild coyote that he’s attempting to befriend. Suddenly Keith feels like he is. Like he’s been cornered in someone’s backyard, and he has to get out, has to get away. His eyes flick to the door behind him, leading to the other lounges and the outer corridor. “Just hang on a sec, okay? Hear me out.”

“Not on your life,” Keith mutters, and bolts for the door.

“Hey—!” the man calls, but Keith ignores him. He lunges for the lock pad, ready to place his hand on the scanner and open it up, but as he does he just—keeps going—

“W- _woah_ ,” Keith reels, because his hand has gone _through_ the lock pad, his momentum carrying half his arm through the wall itself. Shock whips through him at the jarring sight of his arm ending above the elbow where it meets the silver wall, and he rips his arm back, folding it into his chest, staring down at the offending doorway as he clings to his own arm just to make sure it’s still there. “What the fuck,” he whispers. “Where am I? _Who are you?”_

“You’re still on the castle ship,” the man says, and the voice is a little closer than before, but Keith is so numb with shock that he doesn’t feel as much fear as he probably should. “You never left. And…”

The man trails off sadly, and Keith turns to face him again, looking at him more carefully than before. He has soft white hair and his brown skin is wrinkled and worn, both with smile-lines and worry-lines, sunspots and freckles galore. The type of man who’s really lived. He’s wearing a flightsuit like he’s worn one ten thousand times, but with his helmet conspicuously absent—which, for an astronaut in space on an alien craft, is an enormous deal. It throws Keith dangerously off-kilter. This man is comfortable here. His guard is down.

“And _what?”_ Keith bites, although he has a soul-shaking feeling that he doesn’t want to know.

The man's eyes are bright, the blue accentuated by the fact that his eyes are wet, glistening with unshed tears. He takes a deep, steadying breath, and then tucks his hands in his pockets and tilts his head at Keith in an _intensely familiar way,_ and Keith is overcome with primal intuition. He knows this person.

“It’s me,” the man says. “Lance.”

Keith blinks.

The man waits.

It’s… That’s a joke, right? Ha ha? This is a weird prank, even for Lance, but with Altean tech it could be possible, right? Holograms or something. Programmable VR nightmares. “Very funny,” he breathes. “Okay, you can come out now, Lance!” He turns around, expecting to see Lance, Pidge, and Hunk all giggling out of sight beyond the dark glass. “Ha, ha! You got me!”

“It’s not a joke,” Lance says. “It’s been sixty-one years since you went to sleep and had your brain scanned. And I, uh… I came to wake you up.” His voice grows thick and Keith pauses in his search for his idiot friends. “We did more lifescans after that first one, of course, to keep the files updated. About once a month, pretty much. I could've woken any of them, but he— We wanted...”

Lance stops, shakes his head, clears his throat loudly, and then changes direction.

“Arus was just a few weeks ago for you, right?”

“Right,” Keith breathes. This isn’t real. It’s not real. It’s not real it’s not real it’s not r—

“Wild,” Lance says, his voice and eyes filled with wistful wonder. “Absolutely wild…”

For a moment it’s like Keith isn’t standing there at all; Lance is looking straight through him.

“Oh!” He snaps back to himself, and begins to rummage in his pocket. Keith tenses when he pulls out a small electrical device and begins to fiddle with it. “Sorry about the door,” he says, "and the gravity. I couldn’t calibrate you with the rest of the environment till I got you up and running. Aaand done,” he says, a grin spreading across his face.

The world slams into existence around Keith. Suddenly his body has weight again. He can feel the floor under his feet and the faint rumble of the castle’s filtration system, can hear the sound of his breathing sharpening on his eardrums, can feel his heart beating in his chest.

“You should be able to touch things without falling through them now,” Lance says. “Well, most things. Go on,” he nudges when Keith doesn’t move right away. “Try it?”

Eyes locked on Lance, Keith moves backward, nearly stumbling as he readjusts to the confines of gravity, and slowly raises his palm to the door without looking. It connects solidly this time, the surface icy and metallic to the touch, as always. There’s a frantic buzzing underneath his skin now, like his body is trying to escape from itself but it doesn’t have anywhere to go. There’s an adrenaline rush forcing him frantically away from the cusp of a realization that he can’t have, because having it will kill him. “I don’t understand,” Keith says, willing his voice not to break.

“Oh, Keith,” Lance sighs, warmth and understanding and overwhelming pity flowing out of him in waves. “Yes, you do.”

“Shut up,” he snaps, “this isn’t real.”

“Keith, it is.”

Lance reaches out to him, and Keith tries to slap his hand away, but his hand phases through Lance’s with no resistance. Like he’s just a ghost. A snarled cry of desperate anguish rattles Keith’s eardrums, and he only realizes after he stumbles backward and collides fully with the door that _he_ is the one making this sound. His knees buckle as the weight of it all crashes over him. The horrifying reality of what has happened to him between one breath and the next. “Why, then?” he demands. His hands shake as he looks at them, real, and not real. _“Why did you wake me up?”_

An answer hovers tantalizingly in Lance’s open mouth, but it stalls on his tongue, his glossy eyes only the surface of a bottomless chasm of emotions.

Keith panics in the eye of the storm. Changes course. Turns around and slams his hand down on the scanner, opening the door so he can stumble through it into the dark corridor.

He runs.

The halls are dark. Eerily so. All is quiet, save for the pervasive hum of the ship’s primary systems beneath sleek panels and vented shafts and the pounding of Keith’s bare feet against the metal floors. As he runs he yells for Shiro, and for Allura, for Red, for Hunk and Pidge and Coran. He yells and runs until he’s thoroughly lost in the depths of the ship, and thoroughly convinced that the ship is dark, empty, and abandoned. It’s locked in some kind of silent stasis; the only thing that lights his way are those neon blue emergency lights lining the bottom edge of every wall, and the occasional handprint scanner. Red is silent too, or gone. Only when his throat is aching and hoarse does he resort to calling out for Lance.

No one answers.

He’s well and truly alone.

Eventually, he arrives at the door to his own quarters. His bedroom. The scanner flickers blue as he presses his hand to it, and after a moment of processing, the door opens. Keith walks in, but only one halting step, because he sees right away that these aren't his quarters anymore.

The room is empty now. Stark and bare. There’s no sign at all that anyone ever lived here.

He takes a shuddering breath as he rakes his eyes over it, begging his brain to comprehend what he’s seeing in a different way. Maybe he got the wrong room somehow? Leaning out of the doorway, he checks the number on the touchpad outside the door. It displays the same Altean sequence he forced himself to memorize on his very first day aboard the ship, when it was still parked and dormant on an Arusian mountain. Squeezing his eyes shut, he ducks back into the room. When he took off running, what was he hoping for? Maybe proof that this was all some huge misunderstanding, or a joke, or even some fresh Zarkon mind game. Maybe he just wanted to climb under his covers and hide from this like a five-year-old. But… there are no covers on his bed, anymore. It’s been stripped, along with anything else that denoted this room as belonging to Keith, and he doesn’t know what to take this as, other than evidence. Evidence that sixty-one years really have passed.

He knows there are larger things to be grieving right now, but he can’t help hyperfocusing on the loss of this room as his safe haven. This was his _bedroom_. It was the first time he’d even _had_ his own bedroom since his dad died.

He never told anyone that. Not even Shiro.

Now he wishes he told them what this room meant to him while he was still…

While he still had the chance.

He takes one slow step further into the room, but then thinks better of it, and quickly leaves before his panic can catch up with him again.

Magnetism draws him toward the next logical step. The next door, just a little ways farther down the hall. This door outwardly looks identical to Keith’s, but he’s filled with an entirely different set of emotions as he stands in front of it. His hand hovers over the scanner for a moment of agonizing hesitance before he presses his palm down.

Lance’s room is...

Huh.

It doesn’t look abandoned. Not like Keith’s does. In fact, it looks far more lived-in than Keith remembers it being from the one or two occasions he’s actually seen inside. With increasing confusion, he wanders into Lance’s room, soaking in the various posters taped up on every inch of available wallspace, the dirty clothes piled in the corner, the random alien trinkets cluttering the wooden desk and bookshelf. There so many trinkets that it must have taken years to collect them all. Listlessly, he sits down on the edge of Lance’s bed, where the covers are still roughed up from a night of sleep, as if Lance only just left it.

Shakily, he grasps the edge of the bed, closing his hands into fists with the fabric trapped inside, focusing on the feel of it. The slide of cold cotton over the firm, military-style futon beneath it, the folds creasing into the palm of his hands and the space between his fingers. Numbly, he looks down at his right hand. It looks the same as it always has. Feels the same as it always has. But it’s not, is it?

He is the lifescan, wakened. He gets that. He’s not a body anymore. Not human, not even alive. Somewhere, sixty-one years ago, the real Keith woke up from his nap and lived his life. And now he's been left to just... just what? He's not _real_. Does he even exist? What the fuck is he? A fake? A copy?

Fucking amazing, really, the extent of Altean technology. He doesn’t understand the lifescans, or the tech aboard the ship, or any of the physics involved in this situation, and a year ago he would have laughed it off as science fantasy. And yet. What’s that old quote? _Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic._ He’s felt that strange almost-magic howling in the back of his head like a monsoon wind whistling at the crack of a window, ever since the first moment he felt Blue calling out to him out in the Sonoran Desert. She called so insistently that sometimes, in the dead of night as he stood on red mountains, deciding whether to keep on walking through the dark or make camp for the night, he wondered whether it might consume him entirely before he understood it.

 _Well,_ he supposes, _now it has_.

And he still doesn’t understand it. Not any of it. But then, that’s probably how most people in this universe die, in the end; without ever knowing anything for sure. It’s no comfort at all, that he isn’t alone in feeling cheated. He's still basically fucking dead.

Not even an hour ago he was seventeen years old. He might not have had any grand future plans as a delinquent dropout, but things were _just_ starting to turn around for him. He found Shiro. He went to space. He discovered alien life. He piloted a spaceship. He was _chosen_ for something meaningful, and he was even starting to make a few friends. Never in his life did he dream he’d get to do any of these things. He was starting to think about things he'd never thought about before, like where he’d be in five years, and ten years, and twenty years. He even allowed himself, in moments of sentimental weakness, to imagine what it’d be like to fall in love and luck out with some kind of storybook happy ending. In the single weakest moment of his life, he imagined that it might happen with someone he’d already met.

But it’s all over now. Taken away before he even got the chance to let these ghosts of hope solidify into something tangible and real. Here one second—and gone the next.

It’s over.

And it’s from here in this quiet spot on Lance’s bed, in this moment of numb acceptance, that he sees it.

“What…” he says aloud, standing in a daze to cross over to the sliding closet door, which has been left ajar.

A flash of red and white fabric is peeking out from the gloom there, lit from below by the emergency lights. The door creaks as it slides, and Keith pulls on the red sleeve until the shape of the garment is visible in the dark.

It’s his jacket.

Keith’s favorite jacket—his _only_ jacket—is hanging next to Lance’s.

“What the fuck,” he whispers.

“I know, right?”

Keith jumps violently and the jacket’s hanger clatters out of his hand, back into place on the rack. ‘Lance’ is back and standing in the open doorway, a two-tone silhouette in orange and blue against the corridor without. Stranger-Lance. Sixty-one-years-older Lance.

Lance flicks on the light as he enters the bedroom. “I was shocked too,” he laughs wistfully. “Never saw _that_ one coming. Never could have. Not in a million years.”

“What do you mean? Never saw what coming?”

“Us,” Lance says simply, and plucks a picture frame off the tiny bedside table, letting his own eyes linger on it for a long moment before offering it up. Keith takes it numbly, flipping it around to find that it's a photo of himself and Lance. Together. They're standing at the edge of a cliff on some planet Keith doesn't recognize. The water in the valley below is sulfurous and yellow, while the sky is a brilliant pink, nearly white. But the air must be perfectly safe, because they’ve forgone their spacesuits and helmets. Lance is wearing Keith's favorite black t-shirt. (He can tell because there's this little hole by the collar from where a campfire spark burned straight through and singed him on the neck once, way out in the Sonoran desert while he was searching for Blue.) Lance’s arm disappears off-frame as he holds whatever device is taking the photo, and Keith… he has one hand on Lance’s cheek, holding his head in place as he kisses him for the camera. A casual kiss, right on the jawline. Oh. Oh, god.

Keith can only laugh. It sounds manic as it comes out. “You? Fell for _me?_ And I fucking _missed_ it?"

Gently, Lance pries the photo from his death grip. It bothers Keith endlessly that somehow, they can both touch this frame, and yet they can’t touch each other. “Yes. And no, you didn’t miss it."

“What happened,” Keith manages to ask. Because if he doesn’t just _keep going_ , at this point, he’s sure he’ll collapse in on himself like a star under its own weight.

“Between us?” Lance laughs. “It’s a _great_ story, actually. Like, one for the ages.”

“To the ship,” Keith clarifies. The longer this stranger talks, the more convinced Keith becomes that he really is Lance. “What happened to the ship, and to the team? Where is everyone? Why’s the ship been abandoned? For how long? And why did we just…” He glances around the room, at all the clothes and pictures and belongings. “Why would we just leave everything behind when we left?”

The small fire that has been dancing in Lance’s eyes lulls now, calming into something softer. He steps back, angling his head toward the door.

“Walk with me?”

So he does. What else is he supposed to say to that except ‘okay?’

The spaceship's long and winding halls feel less oppressively empty when he's walking through them with this stranger, this Lance, but Keith still feels alone.

They won the war. He learns that as they walk. They won it a very, very long time ago. A lot of things happened before they won, though. Things like Allura being forced to tear open a piece of the spacetime continuum during a particularly rough battle, destabilizing the nearest star and soaking the castleship in radioactive waves, rendering it dangerously uninhabitable to any lifeform. The only person aboard at the time was Allura, Lance explains, who evacuated, and due to her alien physiology she didn't suffer long term consequences. But none of them were ever able to return to the ship again. It's a profoundly sad story, and Keith struggles against a tide of grief as he listens to it, but Lance's voice remains matter-of-fact. It's an old story, for him. Something that happened a lifetime ago.

"If we'd come back," Lance shrugs, "even for an hour, we'd have been signing our own death warrants. This place still won't be habitable for—what's the half-life of radioisotopes again? I don't know, but it'll probably be at least ten thousand years." Something beeps on his suit as he talks, and Keith watches him raise his arm up to inspect a wristwatch strapped around the outside of his spacesuit, frown at it, and silence it.

All the while, Keith gawks at him. "But you… You're telling me the ship we're standing in right now is fatally radioactive? But you're here right now," he points out, growing ever more frantic. "You're not even wearing a helmet!"

Tired amusement dances its way across Lance's face. "Keith," he laughs, "I'm seventy-eight years old. I don't have enough time left to worry about long term damage from radioactive exposure." When Keith is still visibly disturbed by this and refuses to let it slide, the amusement in Lance's eyes softens into something less nameable. "God," he says, "you're so... _you_." And the tone of his voice and the lines of his face say: _I miss you_. Clear as day.

Something settles hard in Keith's chest, something uncomfortable and too big for the space trying to house it. A shape with more sides than three-dimensional space allows for. "Lance, am I… Did I die? Is that why you're here?"

Lance lets the question hang in the air between them for a minute. He turns to continue on without answering, and Keith follows.

They've arrived back at the start again—the lounge where Keith woke up—and Keith wonders why Lance brought him back here again, but he doesn't ask. He's still waiting on an answer to his last question.

They enter the room, one after the other. Lance circles delicately around the dias where Keith awoke, affording it special care while he casts a fleeting glimpse back at Keith. He moves on to the lounge couch that sits at the far end of the room, facing the wide window, the star, and the splatter of star specks beyond.

As he sits Lance throws an arm up on the back of the couch and turns toward Keith beckoningly. So Keith follows, and sits.

"It was just last week," Lance offers, his voice scarcely more than a whisper, "that we said goodbye."

His features are carved with shadow and light, the blinding sunrays fighting the dark of the spaceship, and he doesn't move an inch. That is, until a rueful laugh bubbles up and then fades again.

"You always had to be first."

He says this and nothing more, and it comes off as both joke and lament, somehow, all in one. Keith finds himself imagining Lance saying these same words to some other Keith, some much older Keith, his voice breaking as he struggled to say goodbye.

"How did I die?" Keith asks numbly.

Lance sniffs, and Keith stares at his own knees. "Doesn't matter."

"It does."

Regardless, Lance chooses not to answer again. "He asked me to do this," he continues. "To come and wake you up."

"That doesn't sound like me," Keith mumbles. Would he really? All he can think about is the conversation he had with Allura right before going under (the one that still feels like it happened less than an hour ago), about how everyone is supposed to die someday, and how anything else is unnatural. "I would never have chosen this."

"Maybe _you_ wouldn't have. But people change. You changed."

" _That_ fundamentally?! I don't think so. You're full of shit."

Lance side-eyes him. "I know you're really upset right now, and confused, and scared. But you need to listen to me. I'm on a bit of a time limit here. I'll have to leave this place soon and I won't be able to come back again. And this is weird as all hell for me too, believe it or not. I watched the love of my life _die_ , Keith, six and a half days ago."

"I _am_ listening," he insists childishly, choosing not to let himself get stuck on the words _‘love of my life.’_ Instead, he wonders how radioactive the castleship is now. How long can Lance expose himself to it like this without his insides turning into soup? How many years is he shaving off the end of his lifespan by being here with no protective gear? How many does he even have left anyway?

"Keith told me..." Lance says, slipping into third person again with no warning in a way that jars Keith to attention, "...he told me that when he was young, he was never really afraid of dying. He never wished for a god, or for reincarnation, or for an afterlife. He believed that when it was over, it was over."

"But I changed my mind?"

Lance smiles. "Yeah. You did. You know why?"

A long flare separates from the sun outside the window, dripping into space, and Keith swallows. "Why?"

"During the war, there was a time when the two of us almost died in a collapsed luxite mine trying to rescue some allies. We didn't, of course. But while we were trapped down there we got to talking, about life and death and all that, and you told me that you'd never want to live forever without somebody to share it with."

Now that sounds more like Keith. But…

But it also sounds like he _did_ find someone he wanted to share it with. _Love of my life,_ Lance said. The words rolled off his tongue so easily.

Not for the first time, Keith lets his eyes wander over the man next to him, down the flight suit, cataloging each little detail. It’s dayglo orange, or at least it used to be, years ago perhaps. There are a couple of patches on the upper arm; a NASA logo, a Cuban flag, a United Earth flag, a Voltron emblem, and three more emblems Keith doesn’t recognize which are printed in alien tongues. The suit is firmly wrinkled and flecked with space debris, like maybe it’s been through a crash or six in its time. He furrows his eyebrows at Lance’s right glove, wondering with numb shock if there’s a ring under there. He kinda wants to see it. He wonders if that would make him feel any less terrified. It probably wouldn't.

 _I missed it,_ Keith wants to say, but his throat feels too hoarse from the yelling, and his heart too molten on his tongue. _You woke me up after it was all over, and now I'm here, at the end, for no reason at all._ He's dead. Lance is old and will be dead in a few years, tops. God only knows where he is in space right now, and where the rest of his friends are, and he's trapped on this ship anyway. He's no different than a fucking ghost lost in purgatory! He supposes he could beg Lance to shut him off again, to shut the system down and let the castle stay dark like he should have in the first place, and let Keith's memory rest in peace. But he _feels_ alive, regardless of the reality, and despite what Shiro might argue (or might have argued once upon a time), Keith does have a sense of self-preservation. He _doesn't want to die_. So, he's trapped here now. He's trapped.

"Why couldn't you have just let it be?" he begs, and stands from the couch, stumbling around the back of it to glare at the dias he first stepped down from after Lance woke him. It sits in the center of the room between the couch and the back wall, stark and bare and unassuming and _loud_. It's mostly featureless, save for some laser screens around the edges, some buttons on the front side, and an occupied port. Looking at that port, and the little thumb drive device currently pushed into it, he feels dizzy. _Is that me? Is my entire life on that tiny fucking flashdrive?_ "We should—" _Shut me off,_ he wants to say, _pull it out, don't leave me here to be alone forever, don't leave me in hell, please, don't leave me, just don't leave—_

"Keith," Lance implores, on his feet now too, hands in his pockets. He says Keith's name with too much weight and Keith fears he'll be buried under it.

"I'm going to pull it out," Keith says. Feels like his mouth is moving on its own.

Lance stares. "Alright."

Before he can allow himself to think, before he can allow himself time to be afraid, he picks his foot up and stomps on the drive where it's sticking out, tearing it partially in half with a plasticky, metallic crunch that ricochets off the walls before it hits his own ears.

Nothing happens.

He’s just left standing there in the anticlimax, the broken thumb drive crushed beneath his boot, panting for breath as the adrenaline catches up with him. A thick strand of hair has fallen directly into his eyes but he can't seem to move it, and every time he pants it shifts a little.

"That won't do anything," Lance explains, "since I already uploaded you."

"God damn you, Lance!"

"Can you please hear me out to the end before freaking out again? I haven't even gotten to the good stuff yet, honey."

Keith looks up at him sharply. No one has ever called him honey before—not in his entire life. " _What_ good stuff?!" he spits, the demand hot on his tongue as he truly starts to lose it. As far as he can see, he's been awakened into his own personal hell, and he can either choose to live in it for as long as he can stay sane, or else cease existing. _"What the hell else could there possibly be that makes this okay?"_

"Well, this, for starters," Lance says, and he pulls his right hand gingerly out of his pocket. The fury fizzles out in Keith's throat as his eyes slip down to Lance's uncurling fingers, to the silver flash of light that catches on the object in Lance's hand as he holds it forth for Keith to see. It's—

It's a second drive.

"I—” Keith blinks at it. "What…" But he realizes, even as he says it, that the question should really be: "Who?"

Lance grins. "Me, of course."

Keith... pauses.

That's the only way to describe what happens to him when he comprehends what's being said. What's being offered. The thought processes in his brain all slam to a grinding, screeching halt that leaves him scrabbling for purchase. His heart goes on leave, his mouth forgets everything it knows, and his stomach stops interacting with gravity. For a split second of Keith's life, everything hangs on the most surreal precipice, an ethereal balance where everything he's ever known is somehow both frozen and exploding, all at once.

Lance closes his hand around the drive, and only then does Keith start again. "Can you come back over here?"

Flecks of crushed plastic and metal fall from the sole of his foot and clink on the metal flooring as he blinks stars from his eyes and acquiesces with the request. Because in the palm of his hands is something unbelievable. In the palm of this stranger’s hands is Lance. _Keith’s_ Lance. Lance McClain, seventeen-year-old pilot. And yeah, to be quite frank, he doesn’t know Lance all that well. In the grand scheme of his life, he feels like they’ve barely met. But the crashing wave of utter relief that washes over him, head to toe, when he realizes that Lance—that someone _familiar_ —is nearby, is indescribable, and he feels woozy with it. Dizzy. Five seconds ago he was more alone than anyone else has ever been in the history of the universe. But now…

“Heh,” Lance chuckles, a mote of amused pride seeping out with his voice like the aftertaste of some smug internal thought that Keith isn’t privy to. “Yeah, I thought you’d like that.”

“I still don’t understand,” Keith says hopelessly. Inch by inch he circles back around the couch, watching the nearly indiscernible flickers of sunshadow across Lance’s face as he waits, unmoving, for Keith to approach him on his own. “Why am I here? Why are _you_ here?”

“Why are _any_ of us here?” Lance shrugs. “A question for the ages. Let me know if you ever figure that one out, will you?” That discordant beeping noise blares out from his wrist again and Lance brings his wrist up to look at it, breathing out in shaky increments as he silences the device.

“What is that?”

“A timer.” Lance angles it toward him so that Keith can see the blue face of the watch; just a simple digital wristwatch. “I’ve been here for about fifty minutes. I’ve got about four left to get back to my own ship and get out of here before this radioactive hunk of junk starts shaving off the remainder of my golden years.”

The panic begins to unfurl in Keith’s gut, an inverted flower tunneling down and dragging him with it by the ankles. “You’re leaving me?”

Keith’s words hit home with Lance, and he watches an expression befall his face that can only be described as a progression from shock to agony to sorrow. “No,” he says softly, brokenly, “Keith, no. I’m not. ‘Course I’m not just gonna leave you here. That’s not...”

Heaving a great big sigh, Lance drops his arm to his side (he’d raised it a little, as if to reach out, before thinking better of it) and eases his body down onto the couch in that careful and rickety way that old people do. “Come sit with me,” he requests, with a soft and casual affect, as if they have all the time in the universe for Keith to fulfill the request. The ticking timer in his watch beeps, as if in disagreement. “Just for a few minutes more. Please.”

Keith sits.

They gaze out the window together, Lance on one cushion and Keith on the other. The star that they’re orbiting hurts his eyes to look directly at for longer than a few seconds at a time but Keith stares anyway, letting his eyes adjust to the contrast, to the blinding light of nuclear fusion set against the absolute darkness of the absolute void. He feels like it means something profound, and he wants it to, but the truth is that it probably doesn't mean anything.

“So,” Lance says. “Here’s the rest, Keith. The good stuff. Are you ready for it?”

“No. Yes.”

“I uploaded _all_ of your lifescans to the castle’s database, not just the one Allura took when you were seventeen. All of them, all the way up to the very last one, which you uploaded on the day you died. So you’ll have access to—”

“All of my memories?" Keith realizes with a jolt.

“Exactly. Your whole life. All seventy-eight years of it.”

“And...”

“Yep,” he says, reading Keith’s question before he even asks it by tossing the thumb drive in his hand up once and catching it again fondly. “And I’ll be here, too, with all _my_ memories.”

“Which means…”

“You can plug yourselves in and live it all over again if you want to. Deep dive. You won’t even know you’re dreaming, it’ll be just like the real thing was. I know because we used the system a few times to relive some of our fonder memories together, like the time when we—” He stops himself here, tilting his head away to hide his sudden grin. His watch beeps again, and Keith scrambles to remember how much time is left while also trying to process what Lance is dropping on him. Is it two minutes already? “No spoilers, though,” Lance laughs. “You’ll see it for yourself. And there’s more too. You won’t be limited to your actual memories—you guys can make anything you want! You can program _anything_ into the system and plug into it and it will all feel real, as real as real life.”

“What do you mean, anything?”

“Keith,” Lance laughs, “be creative! Try being a mermaid. Join a band and play at Woodstock. Start a rebellion in the Unified Badlands on Almitrine 6. Check out what life would’ve been like if your dad never died, or if we'd never left Earth all those years ago, or if you and I met as kids. You can make a whole damn new universe if you feel like it, Keith. You’ll certainly have enough time now that you don’t have organic flesh to worry about.” He pats his own stomach fondly as he says this, as if in illustration.

 _Time_. The thing Keith has been desperately trying not to think about. Lance’s watch beeps again, more shrilly and insistently and doesn’t stop until Lance quiets it manually with another deep-seated sigh.

“Did you know that Altean diplatinum has a half-life of nine-hundred million years?” Lance says.

Keith blinks. It’s one of those numbers so large that it essentially means nothing. Humans just aren’t programmed to comprehend numbers that big. “That’s a long time,” he says, wondering what the fuck that’s got to do with anything.

Lance looks at him pointedly. “That’s what this ship’s made of,” he says, “mostly.”

“So?”

“So that’s about how many years you’ve got till the structural failure of this spaceship.” _Oh..._ “That’s about how long you’ve got to explore the universe, man.”

_Fucking... oh._

“Kinda wish I could stay," Lance says, his eyes crinkling at the corners as he smiles. “S’gonna feel like forever, probably.”

Keith’s heart flips over in his chest, teetering on the edge of the abyss of panic in his stomach. The last warning beep is coming soon, he knows, and Lance will leave.

“But I can't. And... it won’t be.” Lance's eyes uncrinkle, his face softening into something almost sad, but not quite sad. Keith tries to read it but he’s never been good with emotions and this one is wholly unfamiliar to him, and he thinks it’s probably one that he himself has not yet felt. “Nothing’s really forever. Eternity isn’t actually a thing, you know? Eventually the atoms in the ship will decay, that is, if this star doesn’t burn up first. It’s probably got a good billion years left, but one day it’ll burn out. Every star burns out eventually.” He pauses, his eyes trailing over the details in Keith’s face as if memorizing them one last time. “Even the brightest ones.”

There's an empty second after Lance says it, and then Keith feels like he's been punched in the gut. As the words linger in the air, Keith feels Lance’s grief radiating outward like a physical force. It’s overwhelming, and even though he’s barely had any time to process this, in this moment he _gets it_. How deeply Lance loves him. Lance loves him in a way that transcends love into something divine, and ineffable, and immortal. He loves Keith in a way Keith’s never been loved before. Not yet, anyway. But _god_ how he wants to know, how he wants to bridge the tantalizing chasm between here and there, and feel it and see it and live it.

The shrill beeps of Lance’s watch pierce the silence, and Lance takes a moment to come back to himself (as though lost in some deep reverie, years-deep and still growing) before silencing it.

The face of the watch is flashing blue now, a neon shade that stands out against the orange of his flightsuit. The timer blinks, incessant.

00:00:00.

“I think,” he says sadly, “that it’s time for me to go now.” His voice wanders its way around the words, lost. He makes to stand and Keith launches to his feet, instinctively reaching out a hand to help him up without thinking. Lance reaches for it without thinking either and nearly falls when his hand passes straight through Keith’s again.

“Oh,” Keith breathes. “Right.”

“S’okay,” Lance chuckles, “I got it, I got it.”

Keith eyes the watch nervously as it continues to flash 00:00:00 and yet Lance still takes a moment to rest on his feet and stretch his arms over his head.

As he turns toward the door Keith blurts out, “What about Lance?” His eyes flit to Lance’s hand, where the second thumb drive is still tucked in one lightly closed fist. “ _My_ Lance,” he clarifies, and he feels so small and fragile as he asks. “You're gonna wake him up too, right?”

The old man smiles, and tucks the drive into his pocket. “I already did,” he says, “forty-five minutes ago.”

Keith’s stomach drops out. “What—”

“He’s over there, in the next room, waiting for you.” The old man gestures one shoulder at the side-window that leads into the adjacent hall between this room and the next, the room Keith stared into right after he awoke, its dark window obscuring the room from sight. Keith doesn’t realize he’s verging on hyperventilation until the old man steps into his field of view to offer a comforting and sympathetic look. “Hey, relax,” he soothes, “it’s gonna be okay.”

“I’m not ready,” Keith breathes, “I don’t even know how to use the castle’s computer or work this lifescan system, Lance hates me, he’s gonna hate this, I _definitely_ don’t deserve this, whatever this is.”

“It’s intuitive, Keith, don’t worry. And no one’s ever really ready for anything.”

“But I’m still wearing my pajamas,” Keith complains half-heartedly. He’s about to see the guy he’s supposed to spend all of eternity with for the first time after learning they’re soulmates, and he’s in his pajamas. It’s cosmically upsetting. He doesn’t think that anyone in the history of the universe has been as underdressed for an event as he is right now. “I— I’m _barefoot_.”

The old man actually giggles at that. “You know, your Lance complained about that exact same thing when I left him to go wake you up. So at least you can take solace in the fact that he’s a nervous wreck in pajamas too.”

Strangely enough, there _is_ solace in that.

“Do you want me to go get him?”

“I... yeah. Okay,” Keith breathes. He thinks his heart might fight its way straight out of his chest if he does it himself. The old man goes to the door from which he’d originally entered after Keith woke up and goes through it. Keith stands frozen in place, watching him cross the narrow corridor between this room and the next and disappear into it. After a second, he comes into view through the window, his mouth moving, talking, although Keith can't hear him from here. A jolt of electricity courses through Keith as another figure steps into view from out of sight beyond the left end of the window.

Lance.

He looks exactly the same as he did when Keith last spoke to him. His hair is still mussed up and he’s still in his pajamas; it’s the same Lance who’d nobly volunteered to get his brain scanned first. He’s young, and ruffled, and as he speaks to the older version of himself in wild hand motions and stilted gestures, the older Lance just smiles and places his hands on his shoulders. It’s pure enchantment that Keith feels as he watches this. He’s never been a romantic. Never thought it was for him, never thought he’d come close, never thought he would ever be able to depend on anyone but himself. But still... the idea that there was someone out there for everyone, someone to face all the horrors and wonders of the universe with, it crept up on him sometimes, late at night, when he felt most alone. And to think that he went out and found that, to think that he’ll never be alone again now, to think that his someone is _right there_... it’s almost too much.

Stupidly, Keith tries to stand up straighter as he waits for them to finish talking, tries to look ready for this, tries to straighten his pajamas as best he can and comb his unruly hair a little with his fingers before Lance looks this way. It’s stupid, he knows that, but he does it anyway. As he’s doing this, younger Lance stills, calms himself, takes a deep, shuddering breath, and then tilts his head toward the window shyly. Toward Keith.

They lock eyes and Keith feels the breath leave his chest.

Older Lance’s hands leave younger Lance’s shoulders. Keith is dimly aware of the old man turning, disappearing from sight somewhere else in that adjacent room, but all his attention is on Lance now. His Lance, who is still gazing at Keith like he’s experiencing every emotion on the spectrum all at once. Keith’s heart picks up even more speed as Lance disappears from the window for a moment.

Briefly panicking, Keith shifts to the side, trying to see where he went, but there’s no need. The door opens, and there he is.

The only discernible difference between this Lance and the Lance Keith remembers is that this one has a faint but unmistakable glow about him. He shines in the darkness, ever so slightly.

“Hey,” Lance offers with a world of trepidation.

Distantly, Keith hears the door hissing shut. “Hey,” Keith replies.

For some reason, Lance finds this funny. He must, because the corner of his lip kicks up in response. Just as quickly as it came, the amusement vanishes. He grows nervous again, and shy, and he bites the smirk off his lip.

What is there to say? What can possibly be said when the gravity of what has happened and what is happening and what will happen still is the equivalent of a billion suns in motion? There aren’t words. Humans never prepared for this.

A deep and stuttering breath works its way through Lance’s chest, and Keith lets go of the pipedream of finding the right words. Slowly, but with rising certainty, he crosses the space between them, watching the way the red-gold sunlight streaming in through the window changes the shape of Lance’s face as Keith approaches him, the canyons of fear filling up with curiosity. And then Keith is there, doing what he wanted to do when Lance first emerged from the healing pod that day on Arus (when Keith realized, as the boy blearily rubbed the ice crystals from his eyes and ribbed Keith for caring, that he’d never be quite the same again). That is to say, Keith hugs him.

Lance is softer than he looks, Keith learns. He’s warm, and very very real, and he quickly snakes his arms around Keith’s back in reciprocation, releasing a good deal of his body weight onto Keith and tucking his forehead gratefully into Keith’s shoulder. And if Keith closes his eyes and tucks his face into Lance’s neck too, it’s almost as if he’s floating, and everything else but Lance is gone away, distant and fine and oh-so simple. He’s just one dust mote in the sea of infinity, stuck to another, like binary stars.

Keith feels Lance’s hands curling into fists on his back, pulling the shirt fabric taut there, making Keith his anchor even as Keith makes Lance his. “This is…” Lance begins to speak but trails off, then pulls his forehead off Keith’s shoulder, not far enough for Keith to see his face, just far enough to miss his comforting weight. “This is real, right?”

“Yeah,” Keith murmurs back. “I think it is.”

“Keith, what are we gonna _do_ ,” Lance whispers helplessly. His voice is ragged, like he’s already been through hell and back again.

Keith’s eyes slide to the right, toward that silver dias, older Lance’s words flitting into his mind. “Everything, I guess,” he answers without thinking, and it must be the right thing to say because a small, shocked laugh bubbles out of Lance’s mouth in response.

Lance releases him then to grab his shoulders and push him back a few inches, for the sake of regaining that rich eye contact. “This is wild,” he says, “and absolutely terrifying, and I feel like I’m being torn apart just trying to understand it and process it.”

“Me too,” Keith agrees. “But I… I’m really glad you’re here, Lance.”

“I thought I was gonna be here alone at first,” Lance says, “until he... you know.” He trails off again, averting his gaze and running one hand raggedly through his hair. _Shy_. That's the only word for it. Keith never thought he’d see the day, but here it is. “Till he explained about you. About us.”

He searches Keith’s face then, like he’s expecting Keith to dispute it somehow, to tell him it was all a giant mistake. Keith searches Lance’s face right back, peering into his dark eyes and trying to read them, half-expecting Lance to say that there’s no way this is right, there’s no way he would have ever fallen in love with Keith. There’s an innate challenge in Lance’s eyes, the same old hard-edged challenge that’s always been there whenever he’s looked Keith’s way. Except now, the edges are a little softer. Less defined. More open to interpretation.

And then there’s this moment. There’s this indescribable moment that Keith will remember for the rest of time, where something deep in Lance’s eyes shifts, and slides into place, and clicks. Something changes, and suddenly a smile is breaking across his face, and he’s starting to giggle, and then before Keith can even blink, Lance has thrown his arms back around Keith in a death grip. He’s giggling and cinching his arms even tighter around Keith’s waist, and the giggle crescendos up out of his mouth like the spray from a shaken champagne bottle, bursting out and filling up the room with sparkling, bubbly laughter. Dazed by it all, Keith is easily hauled off his feet.

“Keith!” Lance laughs, and he doesn’t follow it up with anything, he just dances Keith in circles, jumping and twisting in increasingly sloppy spins until Keith is laughing too. _“Keith!”_ he repeats, as though it’s some kind of question, stopping in his tracks so suddenly that Keith nearly trips over his own feet. He shoves Keith to arm’s length, appraising him with a look so happy that it borders on insanity.

 _“Lance,_ ” Keith mocks, for lack of a better response. His arms hang uselessly at his sides. It’s honestly incredible that he has it in him to blush like a schoolboy right now, with everything that’s happened, but the mind works in mysterious ways.

“Keith,” he intones, “you and me—we’re gonna do fucking _everything_.”

A flicker of adrenaline revs up in Keith’s gut, not unlike the feeling he used to get when he spotted cliffs ahead on his hoverbike. _Reach for the gas, not for the brakes._ “Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know!” Lance bursts, flailing his arms around and releasing Keith from the electric staring contest as he starts to pace wildly, this time by himself. “He said we can use the existing star charts, or we can program literally _anything,_ and spend however long we want in it. Think of the endless possibilities! We can explore the entire universe, do you realize that? We can _do anything we want_. We can chart uncharted galaxies, discover civilizations, sword fight on Olympus Mons—”

“That one's really specific,” Keith laughs.

“I can see my family again, Keith, and my home.” He stops his pacing and turns to Keith from the center of the room, eyes blown wide, begging Keith to join him in his excitement. “We can go back to Earth. We can live it all over again and again—real life, fantasy, everything in between, and—and we don't have to be afraid of dying anymore,” he breathes. "Not ever." And now, finally, his happiness wavers. It cracks a bit and allows Keith a glimpse beneath the surface into the roiling depths below. “I mean, because… because we’re already dead,” he says reluctantly, “and so... shit,” Lance whispers, swiftly turning away to wipe at his eyes and sniffle to himself. “I’m—sorry, I’m just—it’s a lot to process, you know? It’s amazing but it’s… I don’t know, is any of this even worth it if it’s just a program? If it's not _real?_ Will it even mean anything?”

What? What kind of question was that? Suddenly, in the face of Lance’s whiplash left turn and his uncharacteristic vulnerability, all of Keith’s fear and trepidation melts away, and the holes they leave behind fill in with fierce protective desire, sealing him from weakness. “Of course it means something,” he replies incredulously. “Of course it’s worth it.”

As Keith approaches him to chase away that look on Lance’s face, a flash of light catches his attention from his peripherals.

They turn as a unit in perfect symmetry toward the window, where another small flash of light catches their attention. A brief reflection, glinting off a metal surface, out in space. Far beyond the glass, a ship is passing in front of the sun. It’s a small, one-man craft, its wide wings marking it as a surface-to-space ship meant for self-sufficiency and long, interstellar travel. Wordlessly, Keith and Lance both part around the couch to approach the window, reconvening together again at its center so they can look out at the parting ship as it goes. It slows inside the sphere of the star, its edges bleeding and blurred in the white-hot light, almost like the pilot inside has seen the two of them there, standing at the window, twin silhouettes in the faint neon light. The glass is cold on Keith’s palm.

Another flash of light, and the ship winks out of existence, leaving nothing but a trail of light in its wake. Another moment and that, too, is gone.

In the corner of his eye, Keith sees Lance’s hand curling on the glass, his fingers tucking themselves into a loose fist. His eyes travel up Lance’s arm, over his plain t-shirt to his long neck, to the crest of his jaw, to the tiny suns reflecting in his eyes.

“We’ve _never_ properly understood reality or time,” Keith tells him, “or life, or death, so I don’t think we need to start worrying now about whether things are real or not, or whether what we do matters. We’re beyond charted waters, Lance. All we can do is keep going.”

Lance exhales shakily, his eyes dark and deep. For a moment Keith is sure that Lance is about to argue, but he doesn’t. At least, not outright. Instead he meets Keith’s eyes with a hint of a challenge, although for the life of him Keith doesn’t know what the nature of the challenge is. He never does. Not with Lance. As they stare, Lance starts to squint at him, his gaze shifting from distracted to calculating, and suddenly Keith feels naked in front of him, as though Lance might see straight through to his soul if he isn’t careful. The scariest part about that is that it _isn’t_ scary. Being known doesn’t feel quite as impossible as it did this morning.

Whatever Lance is looking for in Keith’s eyes, he must find it, because he sighs and ends the moment, returning his gaze to the star outside the window. “Alright,” he says thoughtfully, “I think I’m starting to get why I fell for you.”

Biting his lip, Keith turns to him in full, leaning one shoulder heavily on the glass. “Me too,” he agrees.

This catches Lance’s attention, drawing his eyes away from the star again. Keith doesn’t miss the flash of interest in his eyes, the disbelief. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Suddenly shy again, Lance scratches at his temple. “I wanna know how it happened,” he mumbles. “He wouldn’t tell me! Can you believe that?”

“Yeah, I can, actually. That sounds like you.”

“Shut up,” Lance pouts.

“Do you wanna get out of here?” Keith asks in earnest, pointing one thumb in the direction of the mechanical dias he woke up on. It comes off like he’s hitting on a stranger, but he can’t find in himself to care.

“Wait, now? Already?!”

“Yeah,” Keith says. “Why not? Isn’t that the whole point?” He shrugs off the glass and goes back to the dias, crouching down to inspect it more closely. Now that he’s looking, it seems like it’s not a permanent installation. Older Lance must have dragged it in here from elsewhere on the ship. He wonders why. For the stellar view, maybe.

"Do you even know how to work this thing?" Lance is beside him now, hovering judgmentally. Keith fights the urge to roll his eyes at his tone. _There's_ the Lance he knew this morning. Guess he's still in there.

"No. How hard can it be, though?" He pushes a few buttons fruitlessly. Would it have killed older Lance to leave them some kind of manual?

"Lemme try," Lance says, crouching down beside him. Keith is about to voice his annoyance but Lance is already pushing buttons, and it only takes a few random presses before a holographic screen pops up, filling the air with glowing text, with bright, bright options that hurt Keith's eyes after spending so long in the dark. "Ha," Lance gloats. But his heart isn't really in the gloating. He scrolls through the list for a moment dazedly, hits another button, and then suddenly the room is awash with stars.

Keith rises to his feet, spinning in place to take in the 3D star map that just enveloped them. “Woah,” he breathes. “Is this the map of the galaxy?”

“Yeah,” Lance says. He brushes his fingertip over the star nearest to his face, watching it brighten and fade again as he retracts his hand and looks back down at the holoscreen. “What’s thi— Oh!” The star map abruptly vanishes as he touches a button, replaced with a map of another kind.

It fills the room as much as the star map did, but it’s shaped differently, almost like a tree extending through the room. It reminds him of the winding branches of Hawaiian Banyan trees. (His dad took him to one of the islands once, when he was so young that he can scarcely remember most of the trip now. It’s all fuzzy, just tropical colors and the faded memory of waves. He does remember taking a hike together through a vivid forest, and straying off the path, and finding themselves in a secluded grove where a wild Banyan tree had made its home. He remembers standing beneath it and spinning around, tracing the erratic paths of its branches with his eyes, squinting into the light where the sun peeked through leaves until he grew dizzy and fell down laughing in the moss.) There are thin strings of soft light connecting the stars here into one giant constellation, and the stars aren’t just white, they cross the entire spectrum of color. Some are so faint that they’re almost invisible, but some of them are so bright that they almost hurt to look at. Kinda like the bare sun peeking through tree branches, he thinks.

“What is this?” Keith breathes. He reaches out to a star that’s hovering just off his right cheek, touching it gently. It’s golden green, and warm to the touch. As he touches it, a flutter of words appear beneath on their own accord, almost as if they’re alive:

_when Dad took me off-trail and we found the hidden Banyan tree_

_Maui rainforest_

_“Woah,”_ Keith repeats, retracting his hand and watching the words fade. What the fuck. How did it… _What._.. “Lance, I think these are—”

“Memories,” Lance finishes, and his voice sounds so choked that Keith has to turn to him. He’s standing a few feet away in front of one of the brightest stars in the entire room, a brilliant lavender-tinged white. He snatches his hand away from it when he catches Keith’s eye and hastily looks away, like he’s trying to pass off that he wasn’t looking at it. It’s so suspicious and enticing that Keith _has_ to go and look. Lance shrinks away from Keith as he approaches right in time to see the fluttery words fading away beneath the memory star.

_first kiss_

_the meadow on velista_

The words are gone before Keith has fully processed them, leaving his mouth dry and his heart racing.

“No spoilers, right?” Lance jokes. He’s looking resolutely away, his hand resting on the back of his neck and dragging halfway across his cheek.

“Right,” Keith agrees. He feels like he’s going blind standing so close to this star, so he puts it behind him. “No spoilers. Let’s do this the right way. Let’s just pick up right where we left off.” He’s not sure how he knows it—intuition, maybe—but he knows which one it is. He knows which memory star is his first lifescan. He knows which one contains the night he sat there stargazing on a port window, Lance coming to get him, and Keith chasing him down the hall before going to visit Allura to get his lifescan done. It’s this little unassuming pink dot, right here. He touches it and the words appear.

_first lifescan_

_castleship medbay_

And he doesn’t know how he knows what to do, but he knows. He knows to double-tap the star in order to trigger the start sequence, and pick up the memory thread. It’s almost like he’s used this program before, even though that’s impossible, and he knows he never has. But as he taps once, Lance calls out, stopping him.

“Keith, wait.” He’s still standing there in the same place by the blinding, _first kiss_ star, his arms listless at his sides, looking lost and afraid.

“Are you okay?”

“ _No_. It’s just—it’s crazy,” Lance breathes. “We’re gonna wake up as if all of this—” (he gestures around at the dimly lit room) “—was just a dream. A dream we won’t even remember.”

“And then we get to live our lives,” Keith reminds him. Honestly, he’s eager to get back to it and out of this weird waking dream, before he thinks too much about it all and starts to lose his head again.

“But I’m not—” Lance swears inaudibly, ducking his head. “I’m not _ready_ , okay? I just need to—” he covers his eyes— “just give me a second.” His hands move to his temples, and then in one swift movement, he drops into a crouch.

“Lance?” Over by the dias, Keith hits the button Lance pressed a minute ago, switching the room abruptly back to the physical star map, the one mapping out the galaxy, hoping that removing the memory map from view will help with whatever has just come over Lance. But Lance doesn’t even look. He just shakes his head once, sharply, before curling in on himself a bit more. He groans as Keith approaches and crouches beside him. “Lance.”

“It’s too much,” Lance says into his sleeve, his voice strained and muffled.

Keith sighs, sitting down all the way and letting himself flop backward, kicking his legs out and coming to rest flat on his back on the floor beside Lance. The star map looks just like the night sky from down here, and just like the real sky, he can’t tell if these stars are moving slowly, or if they’re all standing perfectly still. “Yeah,” he agrees flatly. “It sure fuckin’ is.”

Despite himself, Lance snorts into his sleeve, and then yelps in fear as Keith reaches up and seizes the back of his shirt without warning, to yank him off balance. For half a millisecond he throws his arms out and teeters, and then his back slams on the ground, right next to Keith. _“Ow,”_ he growls pointedly. It’s very _them_ , this little interaction, and it helps bring a flavor of mundane normalcy to this otherwise unpalatable situation. And maybe that helps, because Lance’s arm is still thrown across his eyes to cover them, but he makes no move to get up or roll away from Keith. He just gives up and settles and then goes still.

“We don’t have to go back right away,” Keith broaches slowly. “We don’t have to go right into the memory thing. We can go anywhere, remember? So, let’s just go somewhere. Let’s get out of here.” Out of this dark, old ship. Out of this situation. Out of purgatory. “Anywhere,” he reiterates, because he literally doesn’t care where they go, he just knows that he’s itching to run, and to see the light, and to stand on solid ground somewhere. The stars above them don’t look all that different from the memory map, now that he’s looking. They share a similar placement and intensity. He eyes the bright star system hovering a few feet above Lance’s head, wondering if it might still them lead to the same place where that memory happened. To the meadow on Velista. “Where do you want to go?”

Lance releases his face, reluctantly looking up, relaxing a little when he sees that Keith has swapped the memory map for the normal star map. “Do you really think this computer has _all_ of these places stored on file? What kind of hyper-advanced supercomputer is even capable of that? Is it even possible?”

Keith shrugs and gives Lance the barest smirk, goading him. “Only one way to find out.”

Lance doesn’t rise to the bait right away. “I wish I hadn’t worn my pajamas to get my dumb brain scanned. Do you think we’re gonna be stuck in our pajamas for all eternity now? If we’re gonna be here till the end of the universe then I at least want my favorite ja—”

“Lance, shut up,” Keith says, and Lance turns to glare at him for it but then he sees his own arm, sees the army green fabric now covering it. His jacket.

“Oh. ...Huh,” Lance says, and Keith’s eyes slide down the line of Lance’s body. Between one second and the next, his clothes have appeared on him. His favorite outfit (which Keith can guess because he wears it most often—he always wears it on off-days when there’s nothing to do). It’s the one he left Earth in, the white Vans and the worn-out jeans, the baseball tee and the hand-me-down-looking jacket.

“How did you do that,” Keith accuses, eyebrows furrowed in jealousy.

“I just thought about it,” Lance says, his voice still thick with surprise. “That's all. You try.”

“It cannot be that simple,” Keith murmurs, but as soon as he pictures his own favorite clothes, they appear out of the ether, replacing his pajamas. It’s weird to look at, as it happens, because it just happens. A few pixelated flickers and there they are. “That’s…” He thinks about the first memory star he touched, the Banyan tree. Did he find it just because he’d been thinking about it? Is that how this whole system works? _It’s intuitive,_ older Lance said. Maybe this is what he meant.

Wait.

Wait, but then… But then that means... that means Lance must have been thinking about...

( _First kiss. The meadow on Velista.)_

Lightheaded, Keith chances a glance at Lance. He’s gone back to staring resolutely away from Keith, and if his darkening cheeks are any indication, he’s made the connection too. Holy shit. Lance had been wondering about their first kiss. It’s one thing just hearing about their relationship secondhand from some ethereal older Lance; it’s quite another seeing evidence in his Lance that this thing between them is real and not some giant, cosmic mistake. It eases at the ache in Keith’s chest.

“Hey,” Keith says. He pushes himself up to stand in the middle of the star map again so that he’s within reach of that one bright star, and then points at it. “Let’s go here.”

Lance blinks up at him, his face carefully blank. “Do you even know what planet that is?”

“I can hazard a guess,” he says, and holds his hand out.

Lance gapes up at him for a second, as if he really can’t believe Keith’s being so blasé about all of this.

Then, he reacts. Responds to the challenge on Keith’s face. He takes Keith’s hand, jumps upright with a bounce, and he says, “You know what? Yeah. Fine.”

Without any warning, Lance double-taps the star.

As soon as he does, the castle around them is dissolving. In abject wonder, Keith watches as the silver walls bleed into striped rainbow trees, their outer white bark peeling away in patches to reveal an inner world of crimson, teal, and gold. Brilliant daylight chases away the night in a whirlwind of pixels, and the ship is gone.

Keith turns in a circle, raising his face to the sky to drink in this new place.

The soil is soft and loose beneath his boots. The trees are wet with dew and sparkle in the daylight, each dewdrop holding a tiny sun. The sky is blue beyond the forest canopy, but it’s a much deeper blue than Earth's: it’s pure, refined sapphire. The branches and leaves overhead swish in chorus as the breeze carries through them, and a flurry of tiny pink flowers flutter away, twirling downward and dancing on the wind, some settling on the forest floor where a million other flowers already lie in a thick blanket, some blowing away and out of sight.

Keith closes his eyes, breathing in deeply, letting the susurrus of leaves fill his mind for an endless minute. He lets the minute drag on, and on…

This quiet, semi-meditative state is out of character for Keith; he doesn’t usually like to be inside his own head like this. But for some reason, he’s never felt more relaxed than he does right now. His guard is down. The breeze continues to flow, and the leaves continue to rustle, and he continues to breathe, in and out. All the while, Lance shuffles quietly in circles around him, through the trees, presumably checking out the flora and the landscape of the forest. He can hear him picking at branches and picking up rocks and dropping them again. Sometimes, these habits annoy Keith so badly he thinks he might bite through his cheek. Not right now, though. Right now, it’s endearing, and he’s inclined to consider the sounds of Lance wandering as a permanent aspect of this forest.

“Check it out,” Lance says, and something in his voice gets Keith to finally open his eyes. He’s a few feet away, leaning his shoulder on one of the rainbow tree trunks as he points at something behind Keith, one eyebrow raised and his lip quirking up at the corner, like… kinda like the way Keith’s seen him do at pretty aliens. _Flirting_ , his brain supplies. Lance might as well have shoved Keith’s stomach off a cliff instead. The effect is the same. “There’s a meadow over there,” Lance says, and the corner of his lip climbs up another centimeter.

Glaring (and probably red-faced) at Lance’s outright attempt to flirt, or joke, or tease him, or whatever the fuck it is that he thinks he’s doing, Keith turns around to look. Indeed, there’s a break in the trees about a hundred feet away where the sunlight is brighter and the ground is pinker.

As he’s looking, Lance draws up beside him, disturbing the blanket of microscopic flowers on the forest floor with a soft shushing sound. “So… d’you think that’s the one?” Lance asks, elbowing Keith in the bicep. “ _The_ meadow?”

Keith shrinks away, fixing the collar on his jacket and crossing his arms haughtily. “How the hell should I know? We don't even know for sure what planet we're on.” It’s definitely nice to be in his day clothes again instead of pajamas, and back to bickering with Lance. Feels right. Normal. It feels... safe.

“Hmm,” Lance hums thoughtfully. Too thoughtfully. It’s over-the-top and fake-sounding. It's the way he talks when he’s plotting something. “Hey, I have an idea.” Keith looks over right in time to see him bending down to scoop up a large handful of loose flowers. Before Keith can react, he launches the handful directly at Keith’s face.

As they shower his face, Keith has to squeeze his eyes shut and spit rather unattractively, because at least five have landed directly in his mouth. Blindly he throws his hands out and shoves Lance away, feels him stumble. Lance just laughs though, and shoves Keith right back. There’s a tree root protruding from the ground when he stumbles back, which his right heel catches on.

“Fuck,” Keith blurts as he trips backward, splaying his arms out for balance. He achieves it momentarily when Lance seizes his left wrist, halting his fall.

For a second Keith hangs in precarious balance, the heel of his boot still stuck on the tree root, his wrist firmly held in Lance’s iron grip. Lance’s face is filled with childlike mirth as he looms over Keith, making no move to pull him back up. Keith’s mouth opens, but the witty jab he was brewing up dies on his tongue, because Lance is still leaning down closer, using Keith’s wrist to pull him up too, halving the distance between them. In a split second of weakness, Keith’s attention flits down to Lance’s mouth, and when it flits back up to Lance’s eyes they’re sparkling with mischief.

“Last one there’s a space chicken,” Lance says, and releases Keith’s wrist.

An instant later, Keith’s back slams into the ground, but the fall is cushioned by all the flowers, and the soft moss and damp earth underneath. Lance cackles and tries to run for it, but Keith is faster than him, and he kicks out his leg, deftly tripping Lance in his tracks. Lance goes down face-first, and there’s a brief brawl on the forest floor as Keith tries to launch over him and Lance shamelessly grabs his ankles. Keith gives up on spitting out the little flowers by the time he breaks free of Lance’s chokehold and makes a mad dash for the break in the trees, laughing his ass off all the way as Lance screeches indignantly somewhere behind him. The easy wind kicks up again, carrying him onward, dislodging flowers from his flyaway hair as he sprints. And then he’s through, passing through the gap in the trees into open daylight—radiant, sapphire daylight.

He slows to a stop some ten meters beyond the edge of the trees, eyes flitting around the misshapen circle of the meadow. Imperfect as it is, it almost seems unnaturally circular, and flat. There are no trees or bushes at all across the entire field, just the blanket of pink flowers, fallen from the forest around it, coating the meadow in a layer of pink, softer than snow. Almost as if some creature native to this land has carved out this place as some kind of safe haven. It reminds him of folktales, of mysteries, of magic and fairy circles. It's the kind of place where time stands still and the rules of the world invert. The kind of place where anything can happen.

Lance slams into him from behind, knocking the wind out of his chest as he takes him down.

He’s laughing like an idiot, and continues to do so even as Keith grabs a fistful of flowers and smashes them into his face. It all devolves into petty wrestling yet again, and it only ends when Lance shoves a bunch of flowers down Keith’s shirt.

“Ugh, no,” Keith complains, shoving him away by the face with one hand, “that _tickles_ , I hate it.” Lance makes no attempt to fight back after that, he just flops over backward as Keith shakes the flowers out of his shirt, settling on his back on the ground. Eventually, Keith gives it up as a lost cause when he realizes that there are flowers not just in his shirt but also inside his jacket sleeves too, and in his boots, and in his pants. He sighs, huffs a little laugh, and flops onto his back beside Lance.

Comfortable silence settles over them, during which Keith stares up at the wide, blue, cloudless sky. It’s tranquil. He thinks he could probably stay here in this meadow forever.

“Better?” he asks quietly, after a long while.

“Yeah,” Lance responds, just as quietly. The playfulness has calmed down into something softer. “You know,” he goes on, “I wish we'd been friends back at the Garrison. It would've been nice. We could've started off as friends right away out here and not spent so much time at each other's throats.”

Keith rolls onto his side to frown at him. “You're the one who wanted to be rivals.”

To say Lance is offended would be a monumental understatement. His face contorts with offense and outrage, so much that it’s almost comical. “Only after _you_ ignored all my blatant attempts at friendship back at the Garrison!”

“So it took a little longer than it should’ve,” Keith says with remorse, and a little frustration. “I’m sorry, Lance. I… I had a _lot_ going on back then.” Lance’s outrage calms to mild curiosity, and Keith clears his throat, a little embarrassed. There will be time to get into all of this later. They’re going to bridge these gaps. For now, he just wants to enjoy this. “But we're here now, aren't we?” he offers instead. He’s not sure what the word ‘here’ even means anymore, but he’s also not sure it matters.

After a moment, Lance gives him a fond grin. “Yeah. I suppose we are.”

Valiantly attempting not to blush at that dopey grin, and (even more valiantly) trying not to think about that _first kiss_ memory star, and (most valiantly of all) trying not to lean in closer to Lance than he already is, Keith flounders for a distraction. Any distraction. The instant he thinks of one, he jumps at it. “Ugh, these flowers are even inside my _gloves_ ,” he complains. Once he realizes this, the sensation is so annoying that he has to pull the gloves off to free the trapped flowers. One by one he peels them off and tosses them away before flopping his arms up by his head, bent at the elbow.

Lance reaches up and pokes at the one between them, his left hand. “Holy moley,” Lance says. “I feel like I've only seen you without those on like, twice, ever.”

“That is such a load of horseshit,” Keith laughs, but it's a little shaky because Lance is still poking at his hand. It tickles, but he’s not about to break the spell.

“What the fuck,” Lance complains, “you don't have any calluses? That is not fair.” He looks at his own hand, frowning deeply. “I’ve always had such thick calluses from flight controls and training, and from my gun, and the lion controls now too. How do you not have any?”

“It's the gloves. Why do you think I wear them?”

“I thought you were just an edgelord! I didn't know they were protecting the softest hands ever! This is so unfair.” He continues to feel Keith’s palm, grumbling to himself about it until Keith is grinning so widely at the theatrics that his cheeks ache. Unable to stop himself, he slowly spreads his fingers and pushes them between Lance's, threading their hands together and stopping Lance’s prodding in its tracks.

Lance freezes. He doesn't yank his hand back, or say anything, or do anything for a long moment.

Then, he slowly and deliberately finishes locking their fingers together. His fingertips slide to rest on the backs of Keith's knuckles, and his forearm comes to rest on top of Keith’s.

They chance a look at each other's faces at the same moment.

Lance is biting his bottom lip again. His eyelashes are longer than Keith realized, and his eyes a little more colorful than he realized too. They’re brown, yeah, but they’re not just brown. They’re a little mahogany and a lot maple, rich earth with just the barest tint of autumn gold on the outermost edges. They’re so dark near the pupil that Keith can’t really tell where the iris ends and the pupil begins. It feels dangerous, like a black hole with no shining splatters of starry hydrogen debris around it to betray its location in space. Invisible, pure black, no way to detect them or prepare, too late to take evasive action by the time you feel the foreign gravity tugging at your chest. Just one misstep and _bam_. You’re gone.

Keith’s grip on Lance’s hand tightens as Lance moves, sitting up, putting a lot of sudden weight on Keith’s hand as he does. Then he’s resting on his other elbow and slipping his hand out of Keith’s, leaving Keith’s fingers cold, and empty, and grasping at nothing. But he doesn’t have time to miss it because Lance is leaning in closer, so close that Keith has to roll flat on his back again as Lance leans over him, eclipsing half the sky.

His fingertips ghost across Keith’s cheek. The touch is barely there; tentative and probing. His eyes flit back and forth as he tries to decide which of Keith’s to look into. “I think this is the one,” he says, and Keith doesn’t have to ask to know what he means, but he says it anyway. "The meadow on Velista."

“Yeah,” he agrees, his voice raw from the buildup, from the delicious tension. “Me too.”

Lance grins at this, and his hand flattens out on Keith’s cheek more boldly. The rest of the sky is eclipsed as he draws in closer and Keith fails the test of patience, succumbs to the tension. The back of Lance’s neck is hot from the sunlight as Keith’s hand comes to rest there, drawing him down.

Lance’s eyes flutter shut before Keith’s do, because Keith spends a fraction of a second committing this to memory before closing his eyes (Lance, haloed in sapphire, pink flowers littering his messed-up hair). Lance exhales shakily right before their lips connect.

The kiss is soft and light. Timid. It’s more like a question mark than anything else.

After a moment of the lightest contact, Lance presses down just a little more firmly right before ending the kiss. Then he’s pulling away, just enough that they can meet each other’s eyes again.

For once, Lance is speechless. His mouth hangs slightly ajar with innocent shock, and he has nothing at all to say. So instead of speaking, he moves his hand down Keith’s cheek, watching it raptly as it goes (as if it has a mind of its own) until his thumb is brushing at Keith’s bottom lip. There’s another question mark in his eyes when they meet Keith’s again, the pad of his thumb pulling at Keith’s bottom lip now, gently yet insistently.

Whatever the question is, the answer is a resounding _yes_.

So Keith pulls Lance down by the neck, replacing Lance’s thumb with his mouth again. The pad of his thumb is still dragging as it goes, leaving Keith’s mouth lax and open as Lance meets him again for a second kiss. It takes Lance a second to adjust, his lips brushing against Keith’s hesitantly as he tilts his head. Keith feels his jaw flexing against his hand as he opens his mouth, exhaling lightly. His breath is warm, and it tastes vaguely of that sweet Arusian fruit whose name he doesn’t know, halfway between mint and strawberries. Only when Lance deems the angle perfect does he finish slotting their mouths together, stealing the breath from Keith’s lungs, along with everything else in his body. Keith’s never known what it felt like to _belong_ to somebody else, but as Lance’s tongue slides across his with unfaltering confidence, he learns. Lance makes friends with each and every delicious nerve ending in his mouth, slowly, and methodically. Keith loses himself bodily in the sensation, and he wonders how he _ever_ thought that this little crush he’d been nursing for Lance since Arus was conquerable. How did he ever think he could tame it or bury it or control it? He gets it now. He sees it clearly, how one little spark in a void can become a whole universe when you’re not looking.

Lance’s hand comes to rest on Keith’s chest, as if to calm him, and only then does Keith realize how his breathing has gotten away from him between kisses. It’s grown fast and desperate. But the weight of Lance’s hand is steadying, reassuring. Keith rests his hand on the back of Lance’s, right over his heart. His breathing calms again, because everything is okay. Everything’s okay and it always will be, as long as he’s got _this_. As long as he’s got Lance. Who cares if this place is really Velista or not, or if this is the right meadow, or if this is technically their first kiss or technically their millionth. Who cares if it’s real or not? It’s as real as anything ever needs to be.

"It was on Arus," Keith says breathlessly into the infinitesimally thin sliver of space between their lips. "That was when I..." He's not sure what to call it. It's alright though because Lance doesn't seem ready to stop kissing yet anyway, and he's already dragging his lips against Keith's again before he's done talking, saving him from being forced to finish that unplanned sentence.

And yet, Lance doesn't seem to be able to resist answering, and talks through the tail end of the kiss. "Really?" he says, his voice glowing. "You sound so sure."

"I am."

"Well I, for one, am still trying to work out whether I hadn't quite fallen in love with you yet, or if I fell in love at first sight and I'm just a giant idiot." Automatically, Keith opens his mouth to give his opinion. "Don't answer that," Lance grumbles, "it's not a question."

"You're right," Keith says, "it's not."

Lance leans up then, putting his weight on Keith's chest by placing his forearm there, until there's enough space that he can glare at Keith as he processes that. "I seriously hate you."

"No, you don't."

Lance softens, his eyes crinkling at the corners as Keith grins up at him so unabashedly that his face aches.

"I tried to get your attention for three years at the Garrison, you know that? What the hell did I do on Arus that made you finally see me?"

The unexpectedly melancholy lilt to Lance's voice gets Keith to push himself up into a sitting position, forcing Lance up too until he's sitting back on his heels, facing Keith. For a moment Keith simply sits there, staring, tracing Lance's features with his eyes and trying to pin down exactly what it was about that night on Arus that changed Lance in his eyes. There's the fact that he almost died in Keith's arms. There was the heat in his eyes as he met Keith's gaze and called the two of them a team. There was the tired twitch in his hand muscles as he clasped Keith's hand in his, and the way he still held it tight even as he began to faint, and to fall, the way he continued to hang on for as long as he was conscious. As if he was asking Keith not to let him go. Keith didn't let him go, and ever since, a part of him still feels like he's sitting there with Lance's hand in his every time he looks at him.

Keith isn't sure exactly where, in all of that, he fell in love. Can you really pin down something that intangible?

No. But you can try.

Keith smiles at Lance as softly as he knows how. Good people deserve soft things. "You did _this_ ," Keith tells him, and to demonstrate he holds his own hand up between them, just as Lance did on Arus.

It takes Lance a long moment to understand—to get that it's a handshake of sorts, and that he's supposed to reach up and clasp hands with the one Keith is offering. He does so, his fingers sliding home on the back Keith's hand, their thumbs locking in place. Their eyes meet and Lance huffs a little, half enraged and half tickled-to-pieces by this fresh revelation. "Are you kidding me? That's all it took? Just, touching your hand?"

"Kinda, yeah."

"You are an interesting guy, Keith. I'm really looking forward to getting to know you better."

"You'll have to do that the old-fashioned way," Keith jokes, but to his surprise Lance grows deadly serious at these words.

"I know," he says. "I'm ready."

As he speaks he stands, and as he stands he changes his grip on Keith's hand to pull him upright too. The blue sky disintegrates from the top down as Keith rises into it, taking the trees and the leaves and the pink flowers with it in a shower of dissolving light, so that by the time they're fully standing, it's in the lobby on the castle again, and the lights have settled down into dull, dark silver. They’re back, standing in the star map, right where they’d been before Velista appeared around them.

“Weird,” Lance says, glancing around at the dimly lit room. His pupils are blown wide in the dark as they dilate and readjust. “So weird. This is gonna take a while to get used to.”

Keith grins at him. “Well, we’ve got pretty much forever, so…”

“Yeah,” Lance laughs. “I guess we do, huh.” He’s already on his way over to the dias to switch modes, back to memory map. Keith’s used to it by now, but the brilliant visual of the winding memory tree is still as beautiful as the first time. “Alright,” Lance says. “Are you ready for this?”

Keith nods, returning to the star he recognizes as the _first lifescan_ star. “Come on, let’s go.”

Lance jogs over, but he slows and stops, squinting at a bluish star hovering just above Keith’s. “No, I think this one is mine, actually. I guess they’re separate,” he muses, rubbing his chin as he eyes his own memory star, his voice hit by a wave of sudden anxiety and sadness. “But… we’ll still be together, right? We’re gonna be in there _together_ , right? Or are we just... are we just gonna be experiencing this alone? If we’re just gonna be on our own in there then what’s the fucking—”

Lance's downward spiral is abruptly cut off as Keith’s lips connect with his, and the noise of surprise that leaves Lance’s mouth in its place doesn’t go far because Keith just kisses him all the harder. All he can do is throw himself into it, and touch Lance’s cheek with his fingertips, and wish that he could remember this, knowing that he won’t. Not until he wakes up again, another lifetime from now.

“What was that for?” Lance asks stupidly as Keith pulls away, only far enough to breathe.

“For the road,” Keith says. “And because you’re being stupid.”

Lance’s cheeks darken, and so do his eyes. “I’m not stupid. _You’re_ st—”

“I don’t know the answer to any of these questions,” Keith says, stroking Lance’s cheek with his thumb until the childish rage calms in his eyes. “Everyone’s alone, Lance. Everyone is alone, all the time, from the day they’re born to the day they die. But we’re alone _together_.” Here he drops his hand down from Lance's cheek, into the air between them, extending to him both an offer and a request.

Lance blinks down at it softly, before slowly raising his hand and embracing Keith's. “You know what? That’s strangely comforting.”

Keith grins up at him. “Last one there’s a space chicken.” Lance rises to the bait, and there’s a split second race as they both reach out with their other hands for their memory stars. Keith doesn’t know who wins because the second he touches his own he’s already dissolving, and Lance is dissolving too. It feels like falling asleep, and Keith can’t find it anywhere in himself to be afraid as he watches Lance’s hand come apart around his, fiery photons scattering and blinking out.

There’s another flash, and for a single instant, everything is starlight.

And then, there’s nothing.

But somewhere else, in another place and time, far, far away in the gravity spell of a different sun, Keith is still hanging onto Lance's hand with trembling, aged fingers. And as he looks up at the man he’s loved for most of his life, he abruptly makes up his mind about something that he’s struggled over for years. (He always was the impulsive one, between the two of them.)

"When I'm gone,” he says, “wake me up again.” Something sparks in Lance’s eyes, something invisible yet brighter than the night. "Come on, one more time around, okay? Let's go back to the beginning."

A teardrop falls from Lance's cheek onto the desert grass beside Keith's head, and he asks, hardly daring to hope, "Are you sure?" to which Keith nods. "Then I'll wake myself up too," Lance says, "for you. I'll go all the way back to the old ship and I'll wake us both up, okay? We'll be safe there, and young—”

“—and together forever."

“Well, not _forever_ ,” Lance sighs. “Entropy is still a thing, Keith.”

“Till the stars go dark, then."

“Yeah. Till the stars go dark.”

"Then there’s no reason to cry," Keith reasons, wiping yet another tear away, “right?”

A pained scoff, a helpless sob. "Yes there is. Of course there is."

For the life of him, Keith can't seem to understand why Lance is sad when he's so filled with hope. "Why? We'll be together."

Lance's lip is quaking, and he says, "But not us. Not you and me." _It's not really you and me_ _that I'm waking,_ he doesn't say, though Keith knows it’s what he means to say. _You will still die, and I will still die, and what gets to live on is something else entirely_. "It's not for us. Not really."

"Yes it is.”

"It's not."

"Look at me," Keith says. "It _is_ for us. Time isn't linear, baby, and you and I know that better than anyone. I have loved you since I was seventeen. I'm loving you then, and I'm loving you now, and I'm loving you at the end of the universe—and all of it's happening all at once. So no, I'm not dying, and you won't die either. We're just... circling back around, Lance, and I'm just..." He trails off as the stars behind Lance's head pulse. He's expended so much energy delivering these weighty words. He needs to... to rest a bit...

"Going first?" Lance offers with a teary, lopsided grin.

"...Yeah," he laughs shakily. His gaze is far away now, focused on something out of sight, so much higher than the starry sky above them. "I'm just going first. You can... go first next time." He says it as if it's just a game. Maybe he's forgotten what's at stake. Or maybe nothing is at stake and it never has been and it's only now that he gets it. The maze always seems simple when you're standing at the exit. Maybe it _is_ just a game, and maybe that’s fine.

"Heh. Okay."

"Okay?"

"Yeah. Okay. You go on ahead. I'll catch up, and when I do, I'm holding you to it. I'll see you then, Keith."

Keith's eyebrows furrow, his eyes searching, flitting from star to Sonoran star, trying to find the connections between them all. They're mapping themselves into fractals without his help now, and right as he _almost_ understands what it all means, they begin to grow inward from the edges of his vision, leaving the horizon behind with a Shepard Tone rising, replacing the night—cell over cell—with soft and crystalline infinity.

"When?" he asks. He's forgetting and he's fading and he's chasing the Möbius sky faster than gravity can follow him. "When will I see you...?"

The old, familiar presence stays right there beside him, and whispers the answer:

_Always._

Bright, white light pierces through his eyelids. This is probably what wakes him up, more so than the fading effects of the anesthesia. He blinks, bringing one hand up between his eyes and the light directly above him. The cold medbay chair is digging into his back at an awkward angle, and it only takes a moment of this discomfort for him to come back to full consciousness and remember where he is and why he’s here. Allura was right; it does feel like he just took a nap. He’s still pretty sleepy, actually. What time is it? It’s probably almost midnight on the Altean clock by now anyway, so no wonder he’s still tired. He should probably head off to bed so he can get an early start on training in the morning. He glances off to the side, expecting to see Allura, only to find that the seat she was previously occupying beside him is now empty.

“See?” Lance’s voice rings out from somewhere else in the room, nearly making Keith jump. “It wasn’t so bad, right?”

Keith swivels his legs off the chair, turning to see Lance leaning in the open doorway. He wonders how long he’s been standing there. It really wasn’t that bad, but he’s not about to give Lance the satisfaction by agreeing with him. “Where’d Allura go?”

“To bed,” Lance shrugs, “She had a really long day with all the scans and whatnot, and wanted to call it a night. I thought I’d relieve her of duty. You know. ‘Cause I’m just nice like that.”

Keith is barely listening as Lance rambles, he’s preoccupied cracking his neck and rolling his shoulders back to work out the kink that sleeping in this chair left between his shoulder blades. “Well, it was unnecessary,” he scoffs. He hardly needs a babysitter. Allura could’ve simply gone to bed and he would've been fine.

Quieting abruptly, Lance glares at him hotly for a second before turning up his nose, gathering himself off the wall, and cramming his hands into his pajama pockets. “ _Noted_ ,” he huffs. “Goodnight, asshole.”

And then he’s gone, and Keith is left sitting there, confused as hell, wondering what on Earth Lance has possibly found to be pissed off about this time. Rolling his eyes, he slips off the chair onto the floor, stretching once more as he goes, and affording a sparing glance back at the incomprehensible machine that Allura used to scan his brain. His eyes trail down the sides, over the hard edges and blinking lights and settling for a moment on a thin, silver thumb drive sticking innocuously out from the side near the base of it. Curiosity rolls over in his stomach. It fizzles out, though, as he steps on a stray drink pouch just inside the doorway. It’s mostly empty but it does squirt out a little bit of red juice. He shifts his foot off before the juice can get on it, and notices some other things littering the floor here. Things like a forgotten pair of headphones plugged into nothing, and a book with a thousand-year-old travel ad for visiting Altea being used as a bookmark, which he learns when he picks it up to thumb through it.

How long was Lance sitting here? And why would he even bother? Allura herself said the procedure was fine, and perfectly safe, and that he’d wake up with no side effects. So why would Lance think he needed to… oh.

_It’s just weird, alright? I feel weird about it._

Keith closes the book, feeling his cheeks flush with heat. He said that. To _Lance_. What had possessed him?

Furthermore, what had possessed Lance to take it upon himself to make sure that Keith wasn’t alone when he woke up, knowing Keith was wary about the procedure? Especially as Keith’s self-proclaimed rival? Sighing, Keith gathers up Lance’s headphones, tucking the cord into the book with the bookmark. Just another mystery to add to the pile. He doesn’t understand Lance at all. But god, he wants to. He can admit that much, if only to himself.

After a quiet and uninterrupted walk back through the empty halls, he grabs a pen from his bedroom and scribbles _‘thanks’_ on the Altean travel ad. That should suffice, right? Anything more is too much. Then he leaves the stuff on the ground right outside Lance’s bedroom door, knowing that he’ll find it tomorrow when he wakes.

He must not have been quiet enough though, because he hasn’t even risen back fully to his feet yet when Lance’s door is sliding open, revealing Lance right behind it.

To say that Keith is caught off guard by Lance’s sudden appearance is an understatement. He’s more than simply surprised. He’s absolutely bowled over by an abrupt and indescribable sensation as eyes flick up to meet Lance’s dead-on, a paralyzing emotion that hums deep down in his bones, ringing him like a bell. It feels like he’s been here before in this exact spot in this exact way, or that he’s done this before maybe, or that he’s done it before and he’ll do it again and he’ll do it a million times in a million different ways and he’ll never be any the wiser. It feels like he's standing in a hall of infinite mirrors.

(In a way, he is.)

Here and now, Keith tucks his hair anxiously behind his ear as the door opens and Lance stands there, opening his mouth to say, with an air of surprise, “Hey.”

(Somewhere else Lance is also standing there, and he’s saying ‘ _hey_ ,’ just like that, like it’s just another day, like it's just another hello, because it is. It always is.)

Keith can _almost_ feel all of this, can almost touch these pockets of meaning, but of course, he can’t. He’s grasping at echoes. They’re too far and too strange. They happened too long ago, or they haven’t happened yet. Instead, all he gets for his mental grasping is a swelling and nameless emotion, the simple sense that something important lies within arm’s reach. But even as he chases it, the feeling slips farther away. A dream upon waking.

"Hey," Keith replies, and it feels like the exact right thing to say. It completes the shape.

“What?” Lance asks gruffly.

Just like that, Keith shakes the waking dream off, like it’s nothing more than a raindrop indoors. He nudges Lance’s book and headphones toward him with his foot and steps away, turning to go. “Nothing,” he replies with ease. The feeling is already fading, back into the mysterious ether where all things ineffable exist. In another minute he’ll forget how it felt, and after a few minutes more, he’ll forget that it ever happened, and move on with his life.

After all, it was just a bit of déjà vu.

**Author's Note:**

> _“Well, not forever,” Lance sighs. “Entropy is still a thing, Keith.”_
> 
> _“Till the stars go dark, then."_
> 
> Entropy is thermodynamic decay. The entropy of the universe is always steadily increasing. Eventually, in the distant, distant future, this will lead to the ultimate heat death of the universe, when all the stars have burned out and all matter has decayed. 
> 
> _They're mapping themselves into fractals without his help now, and right as he almost understands what it all means, they begin to grow inward from the edges of his vision, leaving the horizon behind with a Shepard Tone rising, replacing the night—cell over cell—with soft and crystalline infinity._
> 
> _"When?" he asks. He's forgetting and he's fading and he's chasing the Möbius sky faster than gravity can follow him._
> 
> A Shepard Tone is a famous auditory illusion created by overlapping a series of staggered tones over each other, either rising or falling in pitch to create two very different outcomes. A descending Shepard Tone moves downward in pitch forever (not really, because that's impossible, but it very much sounds like it). It's dark and deeply uncomfortable. But then you have an ascending Shepard's Tone, which is ethereal and beautiful and moves upward in pitch forever. It's an illusion of eternal rising.
> 
> A Möbius strip is a three-dimensional shape that has only one surface; an endless loop with no beginning or end.
> 
> Make of all that what you will. ;)
> 
> || [twitter](https://twitter.com/speak_swords) || [my tumblr](https://speakswords.tumblr.com) ||
> 
> For more existential sci-fi: Read ["The Last Question"](https://www.multivax.com/last_question.html) \- a short story by Isaac Asimov. Read the 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke. Listen to "Echoes" by Pink Floyd (the origin of the opening quote).
> 
> For more klance: Read my beta Froggy's fics here [here!!](https//archiveofourown.org/users/king_froggy)
> 
> This fandom isn't dead you guys, there are still amazing writers out here making content, and there's also old, deeply underrated content that you might never have seen. Check out my bookmarks for more fresh discoveries from awesome writers! Maybe I'm old but I don't think there's any need to forcefully divorce yourself from things that make you happy. I know I've said I was quitting this fandom like 8x when all the drama was happening, but you know what, now that the dust has settled, I'll still write klance for as long as it still makes me happy. (I'm still working on the last two chapters of Where the Water Meets the Sky, and there's at least one other project I'm working on.)
> 
> I LOVED writing this. I'm really happy to share it with you all. Please comment if you can; I'd love to hear what you have to say!


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